LG has been showing off cable-free televisions at the CES tech show in Las Vegas
(Picture: LG)A new era of TV could be on our doorstop. And, to be honest, it’s one we’ve barely thought about – the fully wireless TV.
LG and a company called Displace have been showing off cable-free designs at CES 2023 in Las Vegas. The three key questions ae: how, why and should you want one?
The LG M3 is the more conventional of the two, despite being absolutely massive at 97 inches. This is an OLED TV that connects wirelessly to an LG Zero Connect box, into which you can plug all your HDMI devices.
It leaves just the TV’s power cable visible, and you may be able to hide that behind the sheer bulk of the TV itself. The LG M3’s vital statistics are more than solid. LG says it can transmit video and audio wirelessly at up to 4K 120Hz, matching the output of the most powerful games consoles.
You get three HDMI 2.1 sockets on the Zero Connect box and it needs to be within 30ft (9 metres) of the TV itself.
The LG M3 series of TVs that supports the Zero Connect box comes in 77in, 83in and 97in sizes. LG hasn’t announced prices but the current top-end G2 series costs £4,000 (77in), £5,500 (83in) and an estimated £24,000 (97in) a pop. These LG M3 sets are likely to cost more.
Displace TV: true wireless
Displace goes even further with its 55-inch OLED TV. It too has a wireless streaming box for transmission from HDMI gadgets and four batteries that plug into its sides can power the TV for up to a month, with six hours of view time a day. That’s 180 hours off a charge.
The Displace TV can also stick to walls using what the company calls “active-loop vacuum technology”. There’s no detailed explanation of how this works but we do know it uses two large, rectangular suction cup-like pads on the back.
According to Android Authority, Displace says it is designed to stay fixed even during an earthquake. It is still enough to up your anxiety level when the TV weighs 9kg and is set to cost $3,000, presumably without the quad battery pack add-on.
Should we be envious of this full wireless future most of us can’t quite afford yet?
Is wireless TV the future?
The key appeal of wire-free TVs is naturally for interior design fans who find it hard enough to stomach the sight of a giant flat panel TV in the living room. Wireless HDMI devices have been around for well over a decade at this point and the lingering tech issues that remain aren’t those you might imagine.
Solutions like PeakDo’s Wireless HDMI from 2021 showed latency or lag no longer needs to be an issue. You’ll introduce more of that stuff by switching on certain image quality features on your TV.
Given LG’s Zero Connect box is apparently able to shift 4K footage at 120Hz, the bandwidth requirement seems to have been met too – even if wi-fi speeds won’t match today’s HDMI connections until WiFi 7 in, at the earliest, 2024. However, there is one lifestyle hitch for these sets to get over.
These forms of wireless transmission rely on a direct line of sight connection, and the signal can be interrupted or disturbed by someone, or something, blocking that path. This is less like wi-fi, and more like that old TV remote you have to point at a special angle for it to work correctly.
However, it looks like we’re in a race between wireless TVs and the content services themselves becoming wireless by nature. With Xbox Game Pass already baked into some sets, those of us who like the security of a cable may start looking like tech grandparents before too long.
