Samsung has made some waves in the last few years with its The Wall video wall, a MicroLED display designed for both commercial installations and (very) high-end home theaters, which uses individual LED clusters for each pixel. Now LG has revealed its own home entertainment video wall, the DVLED Extreme Home Cinema.
DVLED stands for Direct View LED (which itself stands for light-emitting diodes), and it appears to be LG’s version of Samsung’s MicroLED display technology. Like MicroLED, DVLED generates a picture by using LEDs at a per-pixel level.
This is a significant difference from widely available LED TVs, which are better described as LED-backlit LCD TVs. The LED TVs you can find at Best Buy (and reviewed on our site) create an image using a liquid crystal display (LCD) layer, which is then backlit by arrays of LEDs because LCD itself doesn’t produce light. Both MicroLED and DVLED (and for that matter OLED, which is a completely different picture technology) form pictures and emit light on the same component level, instead of using separate mechanisms for those two purposes.
If all of that seems a bit confusing, it boils down to this: DVLED and MicroLED completely control the light and color of each pixel individually, while most TVs control the amount of light that comes out in much larger patches, if not uniformly across the entire screen. In theory, it means these newer display technologies can offer far superior pictures, especially in terms of contrast. The use of LEDs also means extreme longevity for the Extreme Home Cinema, and LG states that the technology can last 100,000 hours before reaching half-life, at which point components could realistically start to fail.
Using clusters of tiny LEDs means screens can be easily scaled up without needing to deal with the difficulties of manufacturing single LCD panels for each size, though the size of these LEDs is limiting. The Extreme Home Cinema, for example, is available in nine different sizes and three separate resolutions, from a 108-inch 1080p display to a 325-inch 8K one.
This isn’t quite the flexibility offered by Samsung’s The Wall, which can be scaled up to 1,000 inches and arranged in non-standard aspect ratios, but again The Wall is designed for commercial displays as well as home entertainment. Home theater owners will probably want to stick with standard resolutions and uniform aspect ratios like 16:9 or 32:9 ultrawide, and those are the options the LG Extreme Home Cinema provides.
Don’t expect to get an Extreme Home Cinema at any store, though. Like Samsung’s The Wall, LG’s LED home theater wall is only available through custom installation dealers, and is priced on the very, very high end of home cinema displays. The MSRP of an Extreme Home Cinema ranges from $70,000 for the smallest 1080p screen to $1,700,000 for the 325-inch 8K one.
