LG Unveils OLED EX, the Next Generation of Its OLED TV Tech

LG is having a busy CES 2022 and the show hasn't even started. The company already revealed two bizarre OLED concepts and a pair of odd TVs, but today it made its most significant announcement yet by debuting OLED EX, the next generation of its OLED display technology. From a report: OLED EX (the EX stands for Evolution and eXperience, unfortunately) promises to boost maximum brightness, enhance picture quality, and allow for smaller display bezels. The underlying technology -- millions of individual self-lit pixels -- hasn't changed, but the use of an isotope called deuterium combined with algorithmic image processing can increase brightness by up to 30% over conventional OLED displays, LG claims. As boring as that may sound, the science behind it is actually pretty fascinating. LG found a way to extract deuterium, a rather scarce isotope (there is one deuterium atom in 6,000 hydrogen atoms) that's twice as heavy as hydrogen from water, then applied it to its TV's OLED elements. LG says stabilized deuterium compounds let the display emit brighter light while improving efficiency over time. Moving to the second change, LG is using a "personalized" machine learning algorithm that predicts the usage of each light-emitting diode (on up to 8K TVs) based on your viewing habits, then "precisely controls the display's energy input to more accurately express the details and colors of the video content being played."

life is good

[known_coward_69]

80's and 90's we had the same grainy TV tech and the last 20 years have been amazing in the quality of TV's and the price drops

Why extract it yourself?

[Tim the Gecko]

LG found a way to extract deuterium, a rather scarce isotope (there is one deuterium atom in 6,000 hydrogen atoms) that's twice as heavy as hydrogen from water

It seems like it's easier to just buy it [google.com].

Funnily enough, the first advertising link I get is "Super Deuterium Depleted Water - Place An Online Order Today - Most Deuterium Depleted Water On Earth. Results In Fast Metabolism & Higher Energy Levels." But there are lots of actual vendors selling heavy water, etc.

Re:

[vyvepe]

Providing a add-infested google search link is a pinnacle of laziness. You could at least specify the price of heavy water which seems to be around 1-10 bucks for 1 ml depending on the amount bought.

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[rgmoore]

Of course LG is going to be buying in much bigger lots than 1g. If you scale up to 1L, you can get 99.96% isotopic purity for $1274 [isotope.com]

. You might be able to get some discount for buying in a larger lot, but most of the savings are already there from buying 1L instead of 1mL.

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[DamnOregonian]

It's easy to buy it because the article is ridiculous.
There's nothing scarce about deuterium.
166ppm in the most ubiquitous chemical solution on the planet is another way of saying "about 1/6th the concentration of... salt... in sea water."

Deuterium isn't that special

[rgmoore]

Deuterium may be comparatively rare, but it's actually one of the easiest isotopes to purify because it has a huge relative mass difference. For most elements, the isotopes differ by only a few percent in mass, while deuterium is just about twice as heavy as regular hydrogen. That huge relative difference means it's way easier to purify than other isotopes. There's a whole industry around producing compounds with different isotope distributions from the naturally occurring version, and deuterium labeled forms are almost always the cheapest.

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[west]

> There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

Just wanted to say how much I liked your signature. Made me think.

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[dsgrntlxmply]

The Gizmodo summary is inept. Substitute D for H at chosen sites in the organic emitter complex, and get a better compromise point between brightness and service life. Then use the exotic-sounding word with scary connotations as a marketing hook. Imagine the thrill of watching The Heroes of Telemark on such a TV.

Nuclear proliferation

[ghoul]

Any country setting up a heavy water plant can just claim to be making TVs.

Re:Nuclear proliferation

[spun]

Deuterium is in no way the limiting factor in production of thermonuclear weapons. There's already a $98 million a year market for deuterium and it isn't really tracked or controlled. Deuterium has many fascinating uses beyond weapons and fusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

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[MachineShedFred]

And they are still not going to have a nuclear bomb without a source of highly purified uranium or plutonium. Which is why those materials and the equipment to separate isotopes are highly controlled, and not deuterium.

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[ghoul]

You need Heavy water to run a breeder plant to make Plutonium

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[MachineShedFred]

You also need a nuclear reactor designed to use heavy water to make Plutonium. Tell me, which do you think is more obvious to obtain, and thus more easily controlled?

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[careysub]

Any country setting up a heavy water plant can just claim to be making TVs.

They don't need to do this. They can just set up the heavy water plant, they might have buyers for their product.

There is no international heavy water plant police.

Did you know that one of the largest producers of heavy water today is Argentina? It does not make many (any?) TVs, but it sells the heavy water world wide. In fact LG is probably buying Argentine heavy water if it needs more than a few dozen kilograms annually. Romania was the biggest producer in the world until 2016 when the producer went bank

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[ghoul]

Argentina and Brazil both had nuke programs which they have halted at threhold levels under US pressure. The heavy water plant is worth running at a loss to preserve breakout capabilities.

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[DamnOregonian]

Lots of countries have heavy water plants.
Deuterium is useful stuff.

Making it go boom is actually very hard. The fissile materials required for that are much easier to track than something that's 166ppm in sea water.

How about no

[smooth wombat]

LG is using a "personalized" machine learning algorithm that predicts the usage of each light-emitting diode (on up to 8K TVs) based on your viewing habits, then "precisely controls the display's energy input to more accurately express the details and colors of the video content being played."

How about you "design" your tvs so they don't guess at anything and just display the damn image. Your guesses don't mean shit to me. I know what I want. Just let me do it.

How about both?

[skam240]

They probably still allow the user to manually adjust settings.

For me anything that helps to improve picture quality and doesnt involve me spending significant amounts of time doing something I find incredibly tedious using a TV's shithole UI is a plus.

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[timeOday]

I interpreted that as probably just meaning that they track the use of each pixel so they can turn up the ones that have faded by now.

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[drinkypoo]

Yes, this is the most plausible explanation. What we really want from OLED is an announcement that someone has introduced an OLED TV that has a dramatically longer lifespan. Well, that's what I really want anyway, but I don't see anyone else massively overwhelmed in this discussion either.

Also, LG is not who I want to buy a TV from, since every LG product I have ever owned has let me down. That goes double for an extra-expensive OLED TV.

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[John Cavendish]

"Moving to the second change, LG is using a “personalized” machine learning algorithm that predicts the usage of each light-emitting diode (on up to 8K TVs) based on your viewing habits, then “precisely controls the display’s energy input to more accurately express the details and colors of the video content being played.”

It's a euphemism for - we will be watching what you're watching and we will build a personalized database about your viewing habits, and of course we will onl

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[thegarbz]

How about you "design" your tvs so they don't guess at anything and just display the damn image.

You can always turn the damn feature off if you don't like it. Why should LG design for the lowest common deonminator? For many people the feature will look like it improves image quality, and that will make them more likely to buy the TV.

If the feature is controlled, turn it off. If it's not controlled then who gives a rats arse how pixels are shown, when the only important thing is the image itself? It seems so strange to care more about how an image is made than what it looks like.

You can't always turn the damn feature off

[localroger]

If you buy a 4K TV to use as a monitor, you need to make sure the feature called ironically "sharpness" can be turned off, and not all sets let you do this. If it can't be turned off, it will do a low-level interpolation trying to make what might be 1080 content that has been converted to 4K look less like it has square pixels. This scrambles small font text which would otherwise be readable on a 1080p monitor with the same pixel size. Depending on what you are trying to do with the set the way the image

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[thegarbz]

If you buy a 4K TV to use as a monitor

Then you're not the target market nor are you using the device for its intended purposes. As such any desires you have for said device are invalid and should be ignored. It's a TV, not a computer monitor. Buy the right tool for the job and you won't have to deal with disapointment of features not working as you expect.

Downside

[presearch]

The downside is the residual after image it burns into the wall behind you.

If only my eyesight was what it once was...

[bb_matt]

All these "leaps" of tech in the TV manufacturing industry, have left me a considerable amount of generations behind and I still can't really tell the difference between 1080p and 4k a lot of the time.

Ok, sure, I can - but it really isn't that big a deal, when the show is playing and it's a good one, the escapism is just as good on either, really.

The TV we have at home now, is modest by some standards - 40" 4k, relatively cheap - a Phillips with those cool LED's on the back, that illuminate the wall.
I forge

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[careysub]

All these "leaps" of tech in the TV manufacturing industry, have left me a considerable amount of generations behind and I still can't really tell the difference between 1080p and 4k a lot of the time.

Ok, sure, I can - but it really isn't that big a deal, when the show is playing and it's a good one, the escapism is just as good on either, really.

The TV we have at home now, is modest by some standards - 40" 4k

You need to be sitting about 5.5 feet from that 40" TV to see the full 4K resolution, though between that and 11 feet you can see a higher resolution than 1080, but less than the 4K max. Farther than 11 feet they look the same, resolution-wise.

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[flargleblarg]

My god. I can't imagine sitting 5.5 feet away from a 40" TV, much less 11 feet. That's way too far away for movie-watching, in my opinion.

I prefer to sit at a distance that creates an equilateral triangle between my eyes and the left/right edges of the display. So for a 43" diagonal screen, a distance of about 37" is optimal for me. And for an 80" screen, I'll want to sit about 70" away.

Re: If only my eyesight was what it once was...

[Malc]

It's actually less than 5.5' (5" 6'): the break-even point between 1080p and 4K for people with 20/20 vision looking at a 40" screen is 5" 2'. You'll want to be closer than that to really notice the difference.

See the chart on this page, which puts the optimal viewing distance of a 40" TV at 2' 7" to 5' 2":
https://referencehometheater.c... [referencehometheater.com]

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[The-Ixian]

I have a $300, 40" Visio from Target c.2017 that works just fine. It's a "smart tv" but I never connected it to a network and just use a Roku with it.

I don't really see a need to "upgrade" any time soon.

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[blackomegax]

Being familiar with those vizio/TCL tier 40 and 43" circa 2017 having owned one...

What you're missing is that your set is very limited brightness that doesn't give you real HDR. (200nits, vs modern sets up to 600 to 2000 HDR nits). As well as SRGB color spectrum instead of modern DCI-P3 coverage. So basically you're living with a dimmer more washed out image than you'd get from upgrading.

Granted this may be totally fine to your aging eyeballs, but even my old ass eyes were stunned by my new OLED and I'd

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[DamnOregonian]

I have a tablet, a laptop, and a TV with OLED displays.
None are anywhere near HDR10 spec of brightness.

However- on even the dimmest, the HDR imagery looks astoundingly better than any HDR LCD panel I have (iPads, Macs, even my miniLED Mac)
Further, on my laptop OLED, which is around 400 nits, IIRC, it's bright enough to burn an image into your fucking retinas.

Bringing me to my big question... In what fucking world do we need an HDR standard that goes up to 1000 nits?
If I'm certain of anything, I don't

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[blackomegax]

Anything is better than some 200nit vizio that's tonemapping fake HDR

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[RespekMyAthorati]

In what fucking world do we need an HDR standard that goes up to 1000 nits?

In a world where people watch TV in a brightly lit room.

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[Retired ICS]

All these "leaps" of tech in the TV manufacturing industry, have left me a considerable amount of generations behind and I still can't really tell the difference between 1080p and 4k a lot of the time.

That is because is is impossible to tell a 240i image from a 4320p image after it has been compressed to ratshit. In this modern age you need to scale image back down from 4320p to 1080p in order to display a decent picture where all the compression artifacts have become "too small to see".

Can it show "Heavy Water"?

[nospam007]

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5... [imdb.com]

LG OLED

[argStyopa]

I like my OLED LG CX 65" quite a bit.
The concerns about burnin are nothing with normal tv watching, I've had it for >1 year now. Could be real for say, a tv locked on a news channed with the crawl on the bottom of the screen never moving.
The concerns about 'not bright enough' are also overblown; mine looks great in a sunny room. In a dark room above 50 brightness I find it can be TOO bright in high-contrast scenes as the blacks are perfect with no bleed the contrast can induce headaches.

What I would lo

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[timeOday]

I have a similar TV and worry a bit because it is driven exclusively by a PC, so whenever somebody leaves it on, it has the start menu etc. in the same place. But I noticed it self-dims if nothing is moving onscreen for a while, so hopefully it will be OK.

But the contrast is great, and the vibrant colors are pretty fantastic.

Dimming issues

[Twinbee]

Recently bought an OLED LG C1 for desktop usage, and had problems with the display dimming after about a minute of the screen being fairly static. All OLEDs do this, and there are at least three different types of dimming. First is if too much of the display gets too white, the it darks the screen instantly (and brightens it back instantly if less white again). Second and third are related to gradually dimming the screen over a minute if it thinks the display is too static for local and global areas.

Howe