In addition to announcing its own TVs at CES 2023 today, Roku is also announcing its OLED TV Reference Design. So what does that mean? Well, it’s helping partners by creating a reference design, so we may finally see an OLED TV with Roku built-in. So far the only OLED TV with a popular smart TV OS on it is, Sony’s own BRAVIA TVs which run on Google TV. Samsung and LG make OLED TVs, but they use Tizen and webOS respectively.
Now, this is a reference design, so it won’t be sold by Roku, unfortunately. But it should entice its partners like TCL, to start using OLED for Roku-powered TVs.
So how long before we see an OLED TV with Roku built-in? Well, Chris Larson, Roku’s vice president of retail strategy has stated that it takes at least four months for partners to build TVs based off of their own reference designs. So we could see some OLED Roku TVs announced at IFA in August, just ahead of the holiday season.
What’s so important about OLED?
There’s a lot of TV technologies thrown around these days, OLED, QLED, mini-LED among others. But OLED continues to be the best of the best, in terms of picture quality. OLED displays are in most smartphones these days, and one of the main advantages it has is that it doesn’t use a backlight. That’s what makes the darker colors on LCDs look more gray than black. OLED also lights up each individual pixel, making for better color reproduction.
OLED is still fairly expensive, and generally more than a QLED TV. So it’ll be interesting to see what kind of OLED Roku TVs we see. Since Roku TVs are generally pretty inexpensive. Even TCL’s mini-LED Roku TVs are cheaper than non-Roku mini-LED TVs. If Roku and its partners can put out an affordable OLED TV with Roku built-in, they could really take the competition by storm.