LG's 15-inch 15EL9500 OLED TV sets sail for Europe, scheduled to arrive this May

We've had only tantalizingly brief (or is it briefly tantalizing?) chances to see LG's glorious OLED television, but each and every time it's left us with the feeling that our lives are poorer for not having one in our homes. Sure, that says as much about our tech addiction as it does about the 3mm-thick displays, but at least the deep-pocketed among us won't have to wait too much longer to sate the need for 10,000,000:1 contrast ratios and 0.001ms response times. LG has announced it'll be bringing it's 15-inch OLED panel to Europe this May (to be swiftly followed by summer availability in the US) with a hefty MSRP sticker of €1,999 ($2,725) for the Austrian market. Nobody ever said the cutting edge was gonna be a cheap place to live.

[BrownSound Posted Mar 1st 2010 12:31AM]

I had a dream about using this to game off my pc. Sigh...

[CalgaryTechGuy Posted Mar 1st 2010 2:28AM]

What's the point of this? My monitor and my laptop screen is bigger than 15 inches. Wake me when the 50 inch version comes out.

[Mike Vick Posted Mar 1st 2010 8:21AM]

My 37" Lg LH30 which is a 1080p cost 600 bucks in 2009 when i bought it. Perfect economy high def t.v Why the hell would someone pay for a t.v that small?

[Phil Cooper Posted Mar 26th 2010 6:39PM]

The big bugaboo in OLEDs has been the relatively short life spans of the blue LEDs. I seem to recall reading several years ago that a minimum life to half-brightness of 7,000 hours was the development target before the full-color screens would be considered ready for mass production; I don't know if they've succeeded yet. We know that OLEDs have extremely high contrast ratios, far better than LCDs and even CRTs. I don't know what their color gamut is; CRTs with 24-bit color can display over 16.7 million colors, the bare minimum for exacting photo and graphics work, while most LCDs, except for the ones in the US$2,000+ class, are only capable of around 32K colors, roughly where we were in early VGA days in the mid-1990s.

I'm eagerly waiting for OLED monitors to become available, but I won't give up my CRT display until I can get one with a comparable service life, minimum 768 line vertical resolution and a 16:9 wide-screen diagonal size of 23 inches (equivalent to a 4:3 19-inch screen). The technology is obviously not there yet.