Samsung plans to continue its TV innovation by becoming the first to offer a “big-screen” TV with OLED technology.
OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) technology allows for a display to provide crisper pictures, it uses less power, and it is incredibly thin. Picture the slimmed HDTV you’ve seen at Best Buy and imagine a TV that’s even thinner than that.
Of course, the problem right now is that OLED technology is incredibly expensive. Samsung’s 55-inch TV, which it plans to begin selling in Korea later this year, will retail for 10 million won. That’s more than $9,000.
So it isn’t exactly mainstream at this point, but the mere fact that a company will actually be putting a 55-inch OLED TV in stores says a lot for how far the technology has advanced – and for how much Samsung loves being on the bleeding edge.
Samsung was also the first manufacturer to sell 3D TVs in the US, launching multiple models before any other competitor was able to enter the market. However, the issue with being the guinea pig is that if the market doesn’t take off, you’ll be the one who suffers the most.
And 3D TVs have failed to spark in any way in the US. But OLED TV is more of a natural progression for the TV industry – it doesn’t require extra peripherals like 3D glasses, and in a few years the cost of technology should come down dramatically.
If you’ve already head the term “OLED TV” you are probably thinking of Sony. That company actually launched an OLED TV in the US more than four years ago. But to some people, it wasn’t really a TV. It only had an 11-inch screen size, it costed $2500, and there was never a larger model even though Sony said it was working on one.
So while Sony looked like it would be the OLED TV pioneer, it now appears that title really belongs to Samsung.
