Some new details appear to have come to light about at least one feature of the 65-inch 4K rollable television LG Electronics first showed off just a few days ago at CES 2018. To clarify, since TVs were such a big deal at this year’s event and it may be easy to forget which one that was, this would be the LG-branded OLED TV which rolls up into and rolls out of a relatively small box. It was designed so that it could easily be placed less conspicuously on a shelf and hidden away when not in use. Unfortunately, as was the case at CES, there’s still no planned release schedule for the display or any information to hint at how much it would cost if it were to see an eventual release. However, there are one or two built-in features which had not been previously reported.
The biggest newly revealed feature is apparently intended to address a quirk many consumers face thanks to the increasingly diverse array of aspect ratios and resolution TVs are available in. Namely, movies and streaming content are often created with a wider aspect ratio or at a resolution that forces black bars to appear along the top and bottom of a display during playback – something referred to as “letterboxing.” While not necessarily harmful, there’s just something about the sudden appearance of what looks like an increased display bezel that can be really annoying – to such a degree that it may disrupt the viewing experience or cause viewers to lament not using their display to its full potential. According to the source, LG has a novel way of addressing that issue. Its rollable display can automatically detect when media will cause the effect and will actually roll itself back in and adjust where on the display the picture shows. The result is that it removes the letterboxing from view entirely. While that doesn’t actually address the problem of formatting, it might be enough to alleviate the more psychologically-derived affects experienced by consumers.
As mentioned above, it appeared to be the case when LG showed off its rollable OLED display that this was more of a proof of concept than a device that’s planned for the market in the near future. With any luck, the company will find a way to make the technology affordable enough to manufacture on a larger scale. However, it bears repeating that, for now, it may be best to assume that there won’t be any such displays hitting stores anytime soon. With that said, it is interesting to note the novel way LG seems to want to approach the problems of hiding displays and display resolution discrepancies.