So, who had the best demo at CES 2024? GE Profile came close with its smokeless Indoor Smoker, complete with freshly cooked barbecue for the hungry crowds. But for a demonstration guaranteed to leave onlookers agog, nothing could touch LG’s awe-inspiring and transparent OLED TV.
The typically jaded tech press couldn’t help but stare agape at the Signature OLED T’s clear 77-inch screen, which (for the purposes of the CES demo) was installed in a minimalist shelving unit that made the images appear to float in space.
Once the LG Signature OLED TV ships—and yes, LG promises it will actually ship this thing, although it won’t say exactly when—you’ll have other options for placement, including mounting it on a wall or going for a stand-alone configuration. But clearly (ha ha), you’ll want the OLED TV parked in the middle of a room to get the full effect of its transparent design.
Powered by LG’s new α11 AI processor, the OLED T is “practically invisible” when it’s turned off, LG says. When it’s powered on, the OLED T can display images (like a fishtank, which was a go-to clip for the LG PR team) that seem to be floating in the air, while a “T-Bar” at the bottom of the transparent screen acts as a ticker for weather, music track details, news headlines, and other bits of information.
If you actually want to watch a show or a movie without the rest of the room peeking through the OLED T’s transparent display, you can activate a “contrast” screen that rises from below for a more traditional black-screen appearance.
To avoid spoiling the “floating in space” vibe with a tangle of video and audio cables, LG wisely paired the OLED T with the Zero Connect Box, an LG component that can wirelessly transmits 4K video and multi-channel audio to the TV from across the room.
Filing journalists through a Las Vegas suite to check out the LG OLED TV, LG scooped up a raft of money quotes, although there were also some fascinating nitpicks, too.
TechRadar’s Matt Bolton notes that the OLED T’s transparent screen isn’t completely transparent, although LG employs a nifty trick to maintain the illusion:
As with all transparent OLED TVs, the glass is not quite as truly clear as a pane of glass in a window…but you absolutely can see straight through it, and LG has cleverly added light strips to the top and bottom of the empty space behind the glass, which means it looks stylized and mutes the effect of the glass being ever so slightly cloudy.
Henry T. Casey of CNN Underscored described what happens when you turn on the OLED T’s “contrast” mode:
LG first presented a fish tank video on the display, with bright blue-and-yellow fish popping off an inky black background, as is what we expect from LG’s OLED panels. Then, with an unseen click of a button, transparency mode was enabled and that dark black background slowly scrolled down, receding from the TV, leaving the fish to basically float in between the glass panel and the striped wallpaper of the Las Vegas hotel we were standing in.
Digital Trends’ Phil Nickinson praised the “T-Bar” that can (if you like) sit at the bottom of the OLED T’s transparent screen:
Think along the lines of a news and information ticker that lives in the bottom six inches or so of the Signature OLED T, backed by the base in which the contrast screen and electronics live. So you can have all kinds of info there while the rest of the screen is transparent, avoiding the annoyance of a big, black screen staring blankly at you all day when not otherwise in use.
And unsurprisingly, there’s a trade-off between the “gee-whiz” factor of the OLED T’s transparent screen and the realities of its picture quality compared to a standard opaque OLED, as The Verge’s Chris Welch points out:
When the contrast filter is up, the OLED T technically isn’t on par with LG’s very best conventional OLEDs like the G series. It lacks the Micro Lens Array technology that has led to major brightness improvements for that line. I’m an unabashed display nerd, so if I owned this thing, I think it would constantly eat at me that it’s an inferior TV compared to the G4 or, if you want to go even fancier, LG’s wireless M series, which does include MLA. And this TV is destined to cost far more than either of those.
So, how much will the LG Signature OLED T cost? LG hasn’t settled on a price tag yet, but the OLED T certainly won’t be cheap.
Just look at another eye-popping LG concept TV, the rollable Signature OLED R, which arrived with a jaw-dropping $100,000 price tag.
Still, while most of us likely won’t be able to afford the LG OLED T floating in our living room, it certainly makes for a heck of a CES demo.
