LG is the latest display manufacturer to enter the scalable display market. Well, its digital signage solutions have been around for a while, but now it’s bringing them to your house. Well, not your house — and we wouldn’t call the places you’d put these in ‘houses’ — mansion, estate, villa or castle might be more appropriate.
Unlike most modern LCD TVs, which have an LCD screen and some sort of LED backlight, with LG’s Direct View LED TV (DVLED) Extreme Home Cinema, you’re looking directly at the LEDs. The same is true (kinda) for microLED TVs like Samsung’s The Wall, except they use smaller LEDs, hence the ‘micro’.
LG sees Samsung’s Wall and raises
The only problem is the number of LEDs required to do that. A 4K TV has a resolution of 3,840×2160. That’s the number of pixels horizontally by the number of pixels vertically. That equals 8,294,400 pixels if our maths is correct. That’s nearly 8.3 million pixels all requiring power and producing a little heat (as well as light). If that wasn’t bad enough, a 4K TV actually needs three times as many pixels because each pixel is made of a red, green and blue subpixel. So that’s 24,883,200 pixels.
That’s why LG’s DVLED TVs start at 108in (2.74m) because even if they’re using microLEDs, they can only get the pixels so close.
We mention that the LEDs produce heat as well. When you have this many of them that amount of heat is going to add up. So much so, that LG lists it on the spec sheet like you would find for an air conditioner. The 108in setup will produce 6,288 BTUs (Britsh Thermal Units) per hour. That’s a little less than a small office air conditioner.
The sizes that LG offer can get much bigger though. You are able to choose from a range of sizes at a few resolutions. It offers what it calls 2K, dual 2K (two 2K TVs next to each other), 4K and dual 4K and a mighty 8K option.
Is it getting hot in here or is it just the TV
Let’s be honest here if you’re getting a TV to cover an entire wall just get the biggest one and stop messing around. The 8K setup measures 325in or just over eight metres from corner to corner, weighs about the same as a small car and puts out 56,592 BTUs per hour (that’s a lot).
There isn’t a set price for these because each setup will be different. And this is another one of those times where if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. If you do want one you’ll have to contact LG and probably fly the team in to construct it for you.