Today at CES Samsung unveiled a new 55" curved OLED TV prototype. According to Samsung, a curved TV provides depth to the image and so enables a more life-like viewing experience. This is especially true for panorama landscapes and nature scenes, they say you'll feel surrounded by the beautiful scenery.
This is just a prototype, probably nowhere near production, and Samsung wouldn't reveal any technical details. Unlike Samsung's Nexus S phone which used a regular OLED and curved glass, this seems to be an actually curved flexible OLED panel, at least from the photos.
Obviously making a flexible OLED like that is not easy. Samsung is still struggling with their small flexible OLEDs (having delayed production to 2013). But it's good to see them manage to produce even just one flexible panel so large...
Interestingly, back in 2010 Samsung showed a flexible 3D OLED TV concept, which was an idea from their design-your-display contest. The concept TV was foldable - so you can get optimum 3D images from anywhere in the room. The real prototype they are showing now isn't foldable of course, but it's nice to see Samsung actually delivering (at least partly) on that idea from two years ago).
Back in October 2008 Sony showed their own curved OLED TV prototype. While it was much smaller in size (11"), the width of Sony's panel was only 0.3 mm, which is very impressive.
Comments
Hey Samsung, why don't you bring your OLED TV you introduced in CES 2012 to the market first before showing off new prototypes?
At first, I thought the idea of a curved display on a TV was awful. I could really see the difference between this and a regular TV after I saw the TV for myself. All I could think when looking at it was IMAX. While one of my DISH coworkers was drooling over the 4K TVs, I was thinking about how well a few of these TVs would go with my DISH Hopper and Joeys. My whole-home DVR lets me view up to 4 HD programs in different rooms, so I think these TVs are on my list as upgrades for the future as long as they aren’t just prototypes.
Hmm....in my personal opinion the OLED news, well in fact the display news in general, from CES have so far been a bit underwhelming. I didn't really expect any groundbreaking news to start with, but still I am somewhat disapointed because most of the stuff this year seems to be just more of the same.
Mostly what we have heard so far is about larger screens and higher resolution which is nice but let's be honest: A 55" TV for >10,000$ is hardly a game changer and I still don't think 4K2K will be either. And while stuff like this curved screen looks nice at a trade fair, these concepts also have been around for years and still don't really seem to be anywhere close to actual manufacturing.