Undaunted by OLED technology critics, LG display aims to bring HDR 4K OLED TV to the market this year, according to a recent Forbes report.

“LG will have an HDR OLED solution available this year,” said Robert Taylor, LG UK’s Product Manager for home entertainment. “We expect we’ll start to make a bit more noise about this around the time of the IFA technology show in September.”

Skeptics of OLED display technology have questioned whether it would be capable of delivering HDR content, mainly since self-emissive OLEDs are dimmer than LED-driven LCD TVs, which could become an issue in HDR technology which aims to expand pictures luminance and color range.

LG OLED TVs displayed at CES 2015. (LG/LEDinside)

Danny Tack, Director of Product Strategy and Planning for TP Vision (owner of the Philips TV brand in Europe) projected it would take at least three years before OLED technology solves light output issues. “With its wide colour gamut and much brighter light output we see LCD as better positioned to meet future standards than OLED”, he said. LCD light output has improved from 500 nits to 800 nits within 12 months in 2014, but OLED so far has only managed to boost its brightness by around 50 nits every generation, he added.

Samsung representatives also had similar concerns, noting driving up OLED panels to HDR brightness levels could impact the panels’ lifespan.

With HDR becoming a definite trend in the picture quality future, whether OLED TV can be compatible will be increasingly important.

In response, LG UK’s Commercial Director of Consumer Electronics Andy Mackay questioned LCD’s self-emissive nature, where every pixel produces its own brightness. He noted LG sees the plasma technology as the benchmark for OLED comparisons, not LCD. This is further backed by Taylor, who claimed OLED HDR will receive higher priority over HDR LCD.

“We know it’s not the case that OLED struggles with HDR,” says Taylor. “In terms of panel limitations it doesn’t seem like there’s any stopping factor; OLED is actually a much more versatile platform thanks to its self-emissive nature…What’s more the chipsets and power boards used for OLED are different to those of LCD, letting us put more computing power into OLED screens so we can process things like HDR quicker.”

Although, OLED is HDR capable, LG believes the infrastructure for HDR is simply not ready yet.

“HDR is a complex thing,” says Taylor. “There’s the colour element. We also have to look at the luminance element. And then there are the processing algorithms you need. But the main point is that all of these elements that go into HDR are part of as yet undefined standards.

“We’re looking forward to delivering new ways of enjoying content like HDR. But we’ve got the easy job; we display it. The broadcasters and the movie studios are the ones who have to figure out how to code it, how to distribute it, how to commercialise it, how to infrastructure it. And they’re just not there yet.”

Moreover, the lack of HDR content for 4K UHD TV still persists on the market. To work around these obstacles, LG’s main strategy can be summed up in the following three points:

1. Bedding in OLED as a display technology and further supporting the key 4K message for 2015 where the current market trend is.
2. Establishing an HDR display standard.
3. Working with those people who will be creating HDR-based content to define a content standard in a mutual way.

According to Taylor, persisting market rumors that portray OLED as an incompatible HDR technology, might be launched by rivals that “don’t have an OLED TV themselves. Which is pretty ironic given that I think OLED is going to become a major development platform for all manufacturers, whether they have it this year or not.”