Just one day after slashing their curved OLED TV's price from $15,000 to $8,900 in Korea, Samsung finally launched the TV in the US as well. The KN55S9C costs $9,000 and should be available today. It will also be on sale at "select retailers" soon.
The OLED TV has a curved Full-HD 55" panel that offers the "perfect picture quality" (according to Samsung, at least) as the distance from the viewer to the TV screen is the same from almost any angle. It sports a "timeless arena" design (the display is placed within a luxurious frame whose curved shape mirrors the curvature of an arena). and supports Multi-view (where two users can watch two different 2D programs using active-shutter 3D glasses) and it's also compatible with the company's Evolution Kit, ensuring that the TV is future-proofed.
It is very interesting to see how LG and Samsung fight to appear the leaders in OLED TVs. Now Samsung curved TVs are way cheaper than LGs (I'm guessing though that LG will drop their prices too, and soon), and are also considered to offer a better architecture (direct emission OLEDs and not white OLEDs with color filters). We are waiting for someone to post a review of both, head-to-head, to see which actually offers the better image quality.
At $9,000 those OLED TVs are still very expensive and Samsung will only sell a handful probably. But that is just as well, because currently their production capacity is very low. LG already committed to a Gen-8 OLED TV fab for H2 2014. Hopefully Samsung will soon begin constructing their own high-capacity OLED TV fab to be able to compete with LG next year.
