If you've ever thought your TV was a little too... opaque then 2024 is looking like your year. At CES 2024, we've already seen LG unveil a transparent (and wireless) television, the LG Signature OLED T, and it looks like Samsung has cooked up something similar.
Reportedly utilising Micro LEDs smaller than human hairs, nothing official has been announced yet but leaked footage of the TV in action has our jaws firmly on the floor.
Looking like something from Star Trek or Minority Report, the video demonstrates reading a newspaper behind the screen (just to prove it really is transparent) and using the display as some kind of overlay for what looks like a football match. Interesting.
So why would you want a transparent TV? Well, while the best TVs often look beautiful in motion, when idle, they are basically just a big black rectangle in your front room, which is pretty unsightly. Having a transparent display with images projected onto it is much more tasteful, almost like a picture frame.
Of course, no-one wants to see through the screen when watching films, LG's model has a 'contrast screen' that will give a traditional 'solid' image when watching movies and TV while it is thought that Samsung has opted for a zero backlight approach, meaning that you can just switch off each pixel to get a black screen.
As for price and mass availability, don't even think about it. These displays will like be measured in the hundreds of thousands of pounds and we don't anticipate them coming to the mass market anytime soon. That might be a relief if you're kind of person to not look where they're going.
We're definitely more in the fashion statement rather than the functionality phase of this technology, but it's interesting to see where it could go. Imagine a car windscreen or windows with this kind of functionality.
