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LG's curved OLED TV to arrive 'this year'

LG's vice president of Home Entertainment has suggested that OLED TVs with curved screens will hit some retail markets in the second half of 2013.

Nic Healey Senior Editor / Australia
Nic Healey is a Senior Editor with CNET, based in the Australia office. His passions include bourbon, video games and boring strangers with photos of his cat.
Nic Healey

LG's vice president of Home Entertainment has suggested that OLED TVs with curved screens will hit some retail markets in the second half of 2013.

LG's curved OLED on display at CES. (Credit: Nic Healey/CNET)

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) saw both Samsung and LG show off the curved screens. At the time, LG stressed to CNET Australia that it was early days for the curved OLED, and that it was unlikely to be on sale within 2013.

However, Thomas Lee, LG's vice president of Home Entertainment, has told the site TrustedReviews that "curved TVs are coming in the second half of this year".

Hung WK Shin, team manager of the Home Electronics Product Communication team at LG, indicated in his comments to the site that the curved TV is an important product for the company, and one it expects to be popular with consumers.

"Consumers will be most strongly immersed with this curve," he said.

Consumers have waited some time for OLED technology to come to market. While most major manufacturers have revealed some form of OLED range, the problem has been that poor yield rates during manufacturing make the panel prohibitive to produce cost effectively.

Samsung has also told CNET Australia that OLED suffers from mean time between failures (MTBF) problems with "the longevity of the panel itself". Samsung hasn't put a time on its OLED release, saying that it "won't be releasing a product that's substandard".