LG first announced its rollable OLED TV at CES 2019, and since then we’ve been waiting patiently for this seemingly magical concept television to actually ship. Well, the LG Signature OLED R is finally available to purchase, which means you can now enjoy a stylish TV with an OLED screen that rolls down and disappears in the comfort of your own home. There’s just one catch: It costs $100,000.
Obviously, the LG Signature OLED R isn’t for everyone, but we like to cover TVs of all shapes, sizes, and prices, and the launch of the OLED R was stirring enough for us to travel out to LG’s new North American headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, NJ to take a closer look at it. I was excited to spend some time with the OLED R, and while the concept no longer packs the same surprise factor (I did first see it in Las Vegas in 2019, after all), I remain impressed. Although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you buy a TV that costs as much as some homes, the sheer level of design and technological ingenuity on display here is enough to earn the LG Signature OLED R PCMag’s TechX award.
Three Ways to Roll
Let’s start with the base (or case, depending on how you look at it) of the TV. It’s a big aluminum box that the OLED panel retracts into when the TV is turned off. It’s about the size of a coffee table, with a fabric grille on the front for the 100-watt, 4.2-channel speaker system built into the base, along with the drive mechanism for the panel. It’s blocky, sharp, and silver, and can sit on an open aluminum stand (included with the TV) that’s just as large.
Press the power button on the remote, and a long, narrow door on the top back corner of the box slides back, making room for the OLED panel to unroll and rise up. The process is steady and smooth, taking about 10 seconds for the screen to completely extend to its full 65-inch (diagonal) form. Lights dance on the screen and the speakers play some pleasant music as it rises, showing the LG Signature logo before jumping into the webOS home screen or the last active input.
As you might imagine, this rollable OLED panel is incredibly thin, since it’s able to curl all the way down into the TV’s base. It’s less than a fifth of an inch thick, thinner than corrugated cardboard. If this flexible glass was the only component to rise from its boxy home, it would be incredibly fragile and probably flop over and break. Fortunately, it’s supported by two metal arms on the back that telescope as the screen unrolls, providing the rigidity necessary to hold the OLED panel high and flat. The edges of the panel are trimmed with segmented metal bands that feed into the drive mechanism, making sure that expensive screen stays aligned and intact.
Aside from when it’s fully extended or fully rolled up in the base, the OLED R has a third mode for showing off a bit of information without the full 65-inch screen. Line View raises the panel just enough to display a thin strip of active OLED, a bit taller than the base itself. This partially unrolled screen can show a variety of simple menu functions for playing music, checking smart home device status, showing art, providing mood lighting, or simply functioning as a clock.
OLED R Picture Quality
The OLED R certainly looks fantastic from a design perspective, but how does it look in terms of picture quality? Unfortunately, we couldn’t perform our usual battery of tests during our time with the TV, but at least on paper, it should offer fantastic performance.
According to LG, the OLED R uses similar panel technology (albeit rollable) to the excellent LG C1 flat panel OLED TV, along with the same fourth-generation Alpha 9 image processor driving the picture. We can’t attest to the exact brightness levels of this model, or its color range or accuracy, but I can say that visually, the picture looks stunning (as most OLEDs tend to).
Gamers aren’t neglected by the OLED R, either. The six-digit rollable OLED TV also has all of the same gaming features as the LG C1, including a 120Hz refresh rate, auto low latency mode (ALLM), variable refresh rate (VRR), and both AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync Compatible technologies. Again, we couldn’t test input lag on this TV, but if it’s close to the C1, you’re looking at maybe five milliseconds.
As for the remote? Well, it’s a remote. It’s silver, thin, and features both a pinhole microphone for using voice assistants through webOS and motion sensors for controlling an on-screen pointer. It also has a dedicated roll/unroll button that switches between Full View and Line View modes (the power button fully rolls and unrolls the TV into its base). It looks nice, but it’s your standard premium remote with an extra button.
Should You Buy a $100,000 TV?
So, is the LG Signature OLED R worth $100,000? Well, if you can afford to spend that much money on a TV and not feel too put out by it, sure. This is the very definition of cutting-edge technology. It looks absolutely fantastic in person, and is sure to impress any royalty you want to entertain.
For mere mortals, however, this isn’t the type of TV you can buy even if you’re willing to scrimp and save. It’s really more of a fantasy than a product that’s likely to find its way into a number of living rooms.
That said, we see a lot of concepts at CES and other trade shows that never make their way to the real world. The fact that you can actually buy the LG Signature OLED R and experience this marvel of technology firsthand is impressive, and earns the TV our TechX award.
