One of the latest buzz words in the TV industry is HDR - High Dynamic Range. HDR video captures images with an expanded brightness range - darker shadows and brighter whites. An HDR TV will need to be able to display a wider range of brightness levels compared to a regular TV, and so the maximum brightness of any pixel needs to be higher - about 1,000 nits (compared to about 400 nits as the brightest pixel in a regular TV).
One of the challenges with OLED displays is making them bright enough, and usually LCDs offer a brighter image (although for mobile devices, the latest OLEDs are actually brighter than the best LCDs). LG seems to be confident that they can solve this issue, and during a press event in the UK company officials promised that LG will unveil an HDR OLED TV in Q3 2015 - around the time of the IFA 2015 exhibition in Berlin.
Of course an HDR TV will need HDR content, and the standards are not here yet. Samsung already announced an HDR TV, but it's likely that it will take some time (i.e. a couple of years?) before we'll see an accepted standard and some HDR content available...
Comments
What a bunch of BS. If you have a perfect black level, anything can be "HDR", as white is infinitely more bright than black then. What matters is the input (more than the 220 shades of grey per channel that most current videos still adhere to), not the output.
I can already see this nonsensical hype having disastrous effects on OLED, with people once again caring more about brightness than black. Will somebody please just shine a 10000W light into dumb people's eyes? They'll see unparalleled images for days, if not permanently. Now how cool is that?!
On a more serious note - I have watched movies on a CRT projector producing a brightness of only 60cd/m2. But perfect black. Trust me - when lights go on in a movie after a period of darkness, you WILL be blinded a bit.
Think your might be confusing contrast with HDR. Agreed higher colour depth is certainly important.The HDR standard will standardise brightness from the current 120 nits to 100. So the majority of the picture will be around same brightness your used too but with peaks of 1000 nits for small highlights to add extra immersion.The benefits of HDR will be great, and as you say the blacks are the most important which is why OLED HDR is so exciting. LG's latests 4K OLED's have 141 nits full screen white so theirs plenty of capacity to add highlights above 100 nits so the HDR will look great.Also all of LG's current 4K OLED's are true 10-bit panels, as will be HDR models. And the Ultra HD Blu-ray and Netflix HDR streams will be 10-bit. Of course your probably like me and want even more colour depth. I'm just happy were finally getting 10-bit when we've had 8-bit for sooo long.
UHD Blu-Ray is expected for the end of 2015 or maybe very early 2016, and it contains official support for HDR:
http://www.audioholics.com/hdtv-formats/uhd-blu-ray-specification
And this is the reason why all the display manufacturers are now working on HDR.