TechTvsThis is why the first 42-inch LG OLED TV costs as much as a 48-inchWhen it comes to TV tech, size isn’t everything – especially with cutting-edge OLEDsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
TechTvsThis is why the first 42-inch LG OLED TV costs as much as a 48-inchWhen it comes to TV tech, size isn’t everything – especially with cutting-edge OLEDsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When it comes to TV tech, size isn’t everything – especially with cutting-edge OLEDs
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: LG)
(Image credit: LG)
TheLG C2could be one of the verybest OLED TVswe’ll see this year, but the leaked price is causing some consternation: the 42-inch and the 48-inch versions of the TV will both be the same price. That’s according to a listing on the John Lewiswebsitethat lists both models at £1,399 ($1,900, AU$2,650).
It could be a mistake, and we should note that LG hasn’t formally announced the C2’s pricing. But we actually predicted it would be pretty much like this, so it probably isn’t very wrong – and it’s because there’s more to making panels than cutting them to a particular size.
Sometimes less is more
Aswe wrote a few weeks ago, with OLED TVs it’s not always the case that smaller panels are cheaper to make. It’s often the opposite, and as Matt Bolton pointed out: “When the first LG 48-inch OLED 4K TV launched a couple of years ago, it basically cost the same as the 55-inch model, due to how hard it was to produce.”
Part of it is purely maths: TV displays are cut from giant sheets of glass in a high-tech game of TV Tetris, and smaller displays can end up leaving considerably more waste than the bigger ones – so where you might use 90% of the sheet when you’re cutting out 55-inch displays, you might only get 70% utilisation for a 42-inch panel.
New manufacturing approaches can help address that, but new machines cost money, which still means the cost of producing each panel is high. Every time we make a new size of OLED TV, it’s a big and difficult effort, and so the first versions are always priced disproportionately high.
There’s no competition in OLED screen manufacturing for TVs either – LG Display makes the panel in every single OLED TV available today, so whatever it needs to charge is whatever manufacturers need to pay.
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