LAS VEGAS—If LG Display has its way, future TVs won't just turn off. They'll roll up and store themselves away like a poster.
That may sound like magic, but the Korean company has made it a reality. Its 65-inch rollable display is at CES, and LG is confident it'll be a real product one day.
LG gave PCMag a look at the prototype, which sits inside a box that sucks it in like a scroll. With a press from a remote, the display rises up, perfectly straight.
A spindle inside the box gradually unfurls the OLED screen, which has a 4K resolution. As the TV rolled itself up and returned to full size, we didn't notice any trade-off in the screen's quality.
The whole unrolling process takes about 12 seconds, and is silent. The TV can be uncurled and rolled up again 50,000 times over its lifecycle, according to LG.
Packing away a TV like a poster can certainly make it easier to move or hide. But LG's rollable display also comes with another perk: you can physically alter the screen's aspect ratio. In one demo, LG unrolled only about a third of the TV, turning it into an informational display that can show family photos, the weather, or play music.
The rollable display is certainly an improvement over an earlier prototype LG showed two years ago that was only 18 inches in size and had a 1,200-by-810 resolution.
How fast the TV will arrive depends on market demand. But the rollable screens can be built with LG's existing OLED manufacturing line, it said.
Other aspects of the technology remain unknown. For instance, LG declined to say how heavy the TV —and the box it rolls into— actually is or how much it might cost. The company also didn't like us looking behind the display. There's apparently an extra layer of mechanical parts back there that prop the display up.
Nontheless, the technology is certainly impressive.