LG has announced a new lineup of Direct View LED (DVLED) home cinema displays, which range in size from a huge 108-inch HD screen to an obscene 325-inch 8K panel that costs an eye-watering $1.7 million, according to CNET, and weighs in at over 2,000 pounds. The company has previously reserved these displays for commercial buyers, but now it’ll sell them to anyone with pockets deep enough.
Obviously, these screen sizes mean the home theater displays aren’t going to fit in a lot of houses, a limitation that’s likely to have a lot to do with the display technology they’re using. Rather than using an LCD layer to create pixels, and lighting it with separate LEDs, these displays just use LEDs (with some using smaller MicroLEDs, according to CNET), similar to what we’ve seen from Samsung’s The Wall and Sony’s Crystal LED lineup. This has the advantage of creating better contrast levels like what you’d see from an OLED display, because individual pixels can turn off entirely to create deeper black levels, without the risk of burn-in. But the challenge with this approach is making LEDs small enough to work as individual subpixels, hence why these early DVLED screens are so dang big.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22852149/4k_UHD_393.jpg)
As CNET points out, it’s better to think of LG’s new DVLED displays as a replacement for a high-end projector that can already create an image of 100-inches or larger. Obviously a DVLED is a lot more expensive, but you’re left with a screen that gets bright enough to use in a well-lit room, unlike the dungeons that most projectors prefer. Peak brightness output for most of these LG screens sits at 1,200 nits, which is comparable to a regular high-end TV.
Most of the screens are offered in a regular 16:9 aspect ratio, but LG is also selling 32:9 versions in case you want to watch two video feeds side by side (or perhaps watch a film while you grind for Destiny 2 loot). In case you needed any more reassurances about how expensive this display is, LG will ship it to you in a full-on flight case, which even the company admits is “overkill.” All in all, it’s a package that almost starts to make LG’s $100,000 rollable OLED TV look reasonable in comparison.
