34
votes
New LG TVs relegate I/O to a box you can set thirty feet from the screen
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- LG's wireless-ish OLED TVs start at $7,000
- Authors
- Scharon Harding
- Published
- Aug 8 2023
- Word count
- 494 words
Obviously I’m curious as to how this will affect video quality, but all I can say is: cool!
Looks like 30Gbps theoretical bandwidth, so it sits between HDMI 2.0 (18Gbps) and 2.1 (48Gbps). At 4K 60Hz that should be fine for 10 bit colour (20Gbps), but 12 bit may be pushing it (24Gbps - and between overheads and real world signal degradation I’m not sure a marketing-speak “up to 30Gbps” will hit that reliably). For 4K 120Hz (32-48Gbps uncompressed) you’re into display stream compression and/or chroma subsampling territory regardless.
Honestly that sounds overall pretty solid to me: cinematic content with a high enough quality encode that you’d notice the difference will generally be <60fps so able to transmit in full uncompressed 12 bit 4:4:4, and if you’re gaming from the sofa at 120Hz I wouldn’t expect DSC to be noticeable.
The potential killer is going to be reliability: averages don’t show the impact of frame drops or transient brownouts which could ruin the overall experience of they’re anything more than exceptionally rare. It’s 60GHz, which is pretty much line of sight anyway, so I’d be cautiously optimistic - not that I’m planning to buy one, but it’d be a nice option to have if it becomes popular enough to be widespread.
Great. So in addition to still having wires (like the article said, both the tv and hub need to be plugged in, along with the wires, which actually means you'll need one more wire), you have to worry about interface/latency between the TV and hub.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the hub/TV connection went through LG's servers, leading to security and other issues.
Do you mean the video stream goes out over the internet and back in again? I can't see that being true, the latency would be shocking.
No. Not the video stream. But maybe some sort of protocol. I guess my worry would be they could turn off the box remotely for some reason.
It’s sensible to be cautious, but their ability to do anything nefarious is no more or less than it is on the internal chips in any of their existing TVs. I’d much prefer it if that chance were zero on all of their devices, of course, but this box at least doesn’t materially change it.
Exactly, their tvs are connected to the internet even today.
And a box like this has to work offline, it has nothing to do with internet connection.
They're already able to do this just as easily with the current setup by just putting the relevant stuff in the TV itself. Not sure how this introduces anything new there.
Ironically I think this would work a lot better if they just put 1 more extendable, thick wire between the box and TV. And maybe remove the TV’s power outlet (TV gets power from the wire).
Then you have an annoying box somewhere where all of your wires are connected, and a pretty TV which only has 1 wire. Getting rid of that last wire is dumb, and wired connections are always going to be much better than wireless for things like real-time hi-definition streaming (where insane bandwidth and low latency actually matters)
This is exactly how my Samsung TV works today. I have the Samsung QLED QE65Q90R. (few years old now)
This is a terrible idea. This isn't the first time this has been done, but it IS the first time it's been done wirelessly. I had a TV with a completely separate I/O box that connected with a single wire and all the connections were on a separate box. I was initially psyched because it would clean up the wires, but everything that could go wrong did go wrong with that breakout box (overheating, ports died, heavy performance issues, etc). And I then found that since it was considered "part of the TV" you could not get it handled under warranty and replaced separately, you'd have to send the entire TV and box. You couldn't even turn the TV on without it since the power button was on it and not the TV itself. As this was all within the first 30 days, I then went to the retailer (Newegg before they sucked), and they treated the breakout box as a separate item and, get this, discontinued selling it, but still sold the TV. The TV that cannot even turn out without said box. It took literally a dozen long hold calls to get them to take it all back for a refund, but I had to pay shipping, which was not cheap.
All that and the one thing it didn't have to deal with is wireless latency. There is no way I'd play games on this thing.
I am not saying LG can't do better as I have two LG TVs now that I am generally happy with, but I wouldn't touch this TV with a ten foot pole.
I would pay good money for the exact opposite. Give me ports all over the TV and slap some real buttons on the front.
This is a pretty clever solution to the mess of wires coming from the back of the TV. At least for renters who can’t just run a cable through the wall to a receiver. Remains to be seen how well it works in practice.
Doesn't really help in case of a receiver as you will still need to run the speaker cables
You don't need a receiver for wireless speakers.
In case of wireless speakers, the problem is already solved. This TV doesn't add anything new for that.
I think what gets me about TV's like this is the sheer size.
We've got a 32" at home and it does the job for some casual watching. But 90"+ Television screen? That's just... obscene sized surely?
The type of person spending $30,000 on a TV probably has a very large living room or theater room with plenty of space to fit a 90+ inch screen. A smaller tv in such a space might look tiny.
Also, 32 inches seems a bit small for a comfortable couch-viewing-distance, no? Something like a 55/65/75 seems more appropriately sized for a living room without having to squint your eyes or sit too close to the screen.
Back in the day, 32” was ginormous. You kids today…
Back in the day you needed to be an olympic powerlifter to lift anything more than that.
I love giant screens. I have a tiny room and use a 50" TV because that's what I could afford 4 years ago. I'm planning to upgrade to 65" in a couple of years. Larger TVs just have a different experience when you're watching a movie or playing a game on your console. It's truly immersive.
Also, if you're price conscious, beyond 75", projectors start to work out cheaper. All you need is a room you can darken while watching your content.
Edit: meant to reply to the parent comment
I'm in the same boat. A couple of years ago I was about to purchase a 55-inch for our living room because that's what I thought fit the space I had. Then last minute (literally in the store as I was grabbing the tv to put in the cart) I decided to go for the 65-inch for an extra $100 or so. Haven't regretted it for a minute. Next tv whenever this one starts to go (hopefully not for a long time) will probably be a 75, but we'll see.
I'd love to get a projector but my living room has a lot of natural light that would be near impossible to cover up. So either I'd confine myself to only watching stuff at night, or I'd have to convert a spare bedroom into a movie room (which I've considered doing in the past, just never had enough time/money/willpower to do so yet).
You could look into Ultra Short Throw Projectors. Many of them can work decently with higher light than traditional projectors. But my understanding is that you need to invest in the wall mounted screen for it to be passable with ambient light. These don't really break the bank these days, either. It's absolutely an investment, but it's not the cost of a new car. There are some 4K options in the $2,000 range, which is cheaper than what you're going to pay for a 75" OLED. You can get a 75" UHD for much cheaper now, though if you don't care about OLED.
55, 65 at a stretch. Just my opinion of course!
It depends on resolution and distance from the screen. Larger screens need to be viewed from farther away or have a higher resolution. More to the point is your field of view, since a hi-res phone close to your face may also fill your field of view the same.
More importantly, though, is immersion. Together with good surround/spatial audio, bigger is sometimes better. IMO, a big hi-res TV with reactive backlighting and a 7.1 sound system can make even many TV shows a phenomenal experience. Imagine feeling a dragon from Game of Thrones approaching from your left before it appears on your screen, or having a star in a sci-fi film set in space fill up the side of your room. For me, this beats going to a theater (except for select IMAX films) 10x over.
It depends what you're after.
I wonder if this is because I game, but I don't watch a lot of TV? Monitors are always roughly right in your face regardless of size!
I watch Simpsons / Futurama, maybe some movies. But I don't really care for the vast majority of television as I find it profoundly boring and hard to deal with (ADHD). It all feels so over the top, but I guess audipiles and movie nerds would love this kind of thing?
Basically, yeah. But, in case you haven't tried it and you have the video card to support it: I strongly suggest trying out a 1440p monitor with a 144hz refresh rate. Action games at that resolution and above 60fps really do make a difference in experience and in game play performance. You can really see more and react better than on a 1080p at 60hz. They're really not that expensive anymore anyways.
But then again some of my favorite games ever are indie games or on the Switch! Again, specs do not guarantee quality and immersion.
Exactly. Audiophiles are some of the most pedantic and snobby people in the world, speaking from the inside :P So it's best to not compare one's sense of enjoyment of entertainment to them.
It really depends on how far away you are from the TV. I had a 32 inch TV in my living room but the couches were like 3 meters away so it was wholly inadequate. After getting a 65 inch TV I'd never go back, it fits my living room perfectly.
I used to think like this too. I always had a 42" and that was enough. But at least for the last 10 years I wanted a projector to get a more cinema'ish feeling and now my screen size is around 160". It was fun to see how small the old TV was in comparison to the projected image.
Is that completely overblown? Definitely!
Is every movie I watch an absolute blast? Yes!
The good side is that you don't have to rely on those wireless solutions. You only have to hide two wires along the ceiling down to the floor and those are never in sight. You can reuse your projected wall for other things when it's not running. You don't have a giant black screen on your wall consuming your living room. Obviously, with a 5.1 / 7.1 sound system you still need to wire a lot or use wireless speakers.
30k for a TV would be totally nuts for me even if I would be a millionaire. Even 5k for the 77" would be unacceptable.
This other TV mentioned is both jawdroppingly stupid and unironically amazing. I'm sure somebody somewhere has a perfect use case for it, but I am at a loss what it might be.
I can't imagine mounting my TV with a temporary method like that. What happens if the batteries get low while you were out all day? You either get home to a tragedy or waken up in the middle of the night with a gigantic panic!
I just realized they made a terrible mistake. They left out the touchscreen!
This doesn't help me as long as all wiring must be on the box. Ideally I want most things to stay nicely hidden behind the TV; I don't need physical access to the ethernet cable or to TV boxes (they already have remotes and it's pointless to add wireless interference and latency to that hop).
It would help as an optional add-on strictly for certain consoles and USB sticks.
Relegate seems the wrong choice of word here, that sounds reallly appealing.
I can see this being useful for commercial spaces where they have LCDs set up. In addition to cleaning up the situation with wires, it seems like it would make servicing and maintenance much easier for all the I/O to be clustered close together while the TVs will need to be more spread out. Of course then the boxes will all interfere with each other and you probably want a setup with a central controller anyway that beams the same thing to every television, so who knows.
For home use I just don't see the value. Theoretically it seems good, but it has the WiFi router problem where people will want to hide the unsightly cables somewhere out of the way, but that's exactly where you don't want to put things if you want good signal. TVs already tend to get placed on or near walls, so it seems simpler to just have a dumb box that all the cables go into. The iMac sort of does this, with the ethernet port plugging into the power brick so the all-in-one monitor itself just theoretically needs one cord running over your desk instead of two.
Looking at the photos (and maybe this is just me and my affinity for component systems and versatility), but I'm kinda surprised there's not an analog/RCA in (just antenna) on the separate box, nor an audio out, although the latter is uncommon on most TVs even now (I had to get an HDMI-ARC to RCA output to run my TV through my stereo system). It seems if you're providing a standalone connection box you might as well provide all the connectivity, rather than still requiring adapters and dongles.
Yeah, I'm not the target audience for this.
1.) I have to have that box within line of sight so it's not like it can be tucked away in a side dresser or something.
2.) The cords will still have to run to that box... My entertainment stand is already designed to hide the wires as much as possible!
3.) I think this is probably designed with your rich uncle with the TV mounted over the fireplace instead of somewhere sensible. I've got a PC and about ten consoles all nearly tucked under the TV. The cables are run along the legs of the TV and barely noticeable. If I got one of these, I'd need to completely redesign my living room.
Also, for the cost of one of these, I could completely redesign my entertainment stand.