LG to unveil 18-inch OLED display that ‘can be rolled up like a newspaper’

By Jamie Lendino 

LG, Samsung, Sony, and other display manufacturers have unveiled flexible screens before, but this concept is more advanced, and frankly, stunning. The company is showing off at CES 2016 an 18-inch rollable display that can be rolled up like a newspaper. What’s interesting about this is the sheer size of the panel, if you can call it such; most manufacturers have shown off bendable displays at various smaller sizes in the past, and of course curved (but fixed) HDTVs have been in stores for several years now.

Instead of this fitting a smartphone that you could put in your pocket, a display like this is much tougher to pull off, and removes the hard barrier you’d find on a large tablet or convertible laptop that sets its form factor a certain way. The imagination can run wild with the possibilities; a few off the top of our heads would be a second screen for a smartphone, or (eventually) a full-blown tablet with an on-screen keyboard that you could just unroll onto a table and start working on.

At the show, LG is also showing a range of new products, including a dual-window 55-inch display, an 86-inch LCD, and a 139-inch Vertical Tiling OLED displays all appropriate for commercial signage; a 25-inch “waterfall” curved LCD designed for car interiors; and a 10.3-inch car display that works with gloved hands. We imagine LG will show off a bunch of new HDTVs we can actually buy, too.

LG is no stranger to solid display tech, even though Samsung and Vizio seem to have the most mindshare for consumer HDTV shopping these days. In May, LG unveiled a wallpaper-thin 55-inch OLED concept (pictured above) that weighed just four pounds and attached to the wall via a magnetic mat; you could then peel the display off of it and move it from room to room, assuming you had multiple magnetic mats installed on the walls.

Back in September, DisplayMate’s Ray Soneira pitted the $6,000 65-inch LG 65EG9600 OLED panel against a $5,000 Samsung UN65JS9500, and tested it for color gamut, backlight bleed, viewing angles, and more. The LG did substantially better on a variety of tests against the Samsung.

In October, for more weird display fun, LG unveiled the V10, an Android phone with two screens and two selfie cameras; the device went on to do well in reviews around the Web.

Later on this week, we should learn more about the foldable 18-inch OLED display, and hopefully how it’s made; stay tuned for details.