Gear

LG’s Signature OLED R is a rolling marvel with a snag

And we’re not talking about the rollable TV’s £100,000 price tag, either

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It’s fine to be thrilled by the LG Signature OLED R, and it’s fine to be outraged. What’s important, when confronted by this rollable OLED TV that costs a quid shy of £100,000, is not to be ambivalent. Ambivalence would indicate a terminal lack of imagination.

LG has been promising a rollable OLED TV for a couple of years now, and has demonstrated the technology several times. But, apart from a trial sales period in South Korea, it’s taken until now for the Signature OLED R to go on sale in the UK. 

Exciting new technology is always expensive when it’s first launched, of course. LG’s first 55in OLED TV, launched in 2012, was pricey at £10,000, but it didn’t (as the Signature R does) cost as much as a Mercedes-Benz S-Class with the options list peppered with ticks. So how does LG possibly hope to justify the price of this big, desirable and undeniably rollable OLED TV?

Well, it doesn’t. It doesn’t have to. The Signature OLED R is a demonstration of engineering excellence, a statement of intent and the harbinger of things to come. You can either afford one or you can’t. So far, according to deeply unofficial reports, ten South Korean customers have decided they can afford one.

For a moment, though, we’re going to put the price to one side and discuss the Signature OLED R as if it were just another television.

This is a 65in OLED screen with a 4K resolution and support for HLG and Dolby Vision IQ HDR standards, as well as HR10 Pro (which tone-maps every frame of HDR10 content). As far as connectivity goes, there are four HDMI inputs – one with eARC support and all four with HDMI 2.1 compatibility – alongside a couple of USB sockets, a CI slot, three aerial binding posts for the screen’s twin TV tuners and a LAN socket. Wi-Fi is available, too, naturally. As far as outputs go, there’s a single digital optical socket.

Control is via an extremely agreeable metal remote handset that features tidily realised raised buttons, a scroll-wheel and direct-access buttons for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Rakuten streaming services. There are also buttons to summon both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa voice assistants.

The Signature OLED R also features LG’s exemplary webOS smart TV interface, and it’s all the better for it. LG is not alone in tricking out its TVs with a clear, logical and very comprehensive smart TV offering, but nevertheless webOS remains a fine and usable example.

So far, so quite-like-a-regular-TV. But from here, the LG becomes an entirely different proposition.

The Signature OLED R is housed in a substantial (224 x 1592 x 266mm, 64kg), beautifully finished box-like enclosure, with a comprehensive speaker array behind a quantity of Kvadrat acoustic cloth. It sits on top of an open stand which is basically a big shelf for your cable TV box, next-gen games console, 4K Blu-ray player and what-have-you beneath. It’s the rear of this big box that is home to all those inputs and outputs, as well as a cable for mains power. Press and hold the ‘power’ button that’s also positioned on the back of the box and the magic happens.

There’s a 65in OLED screen rolled up inside the box, and pressing ‘power’ raises it – tantalisingly slowly, and with some appropriately anticipatory chimes and chirps – from the box. The screen itself is almost laughably thin. It’s no more than 3mm deep. And though the braces at either side that hold the numerous segments of the screen taut add a little to the depth, this is the OLED TV we were promised right from the infancy of the technology back at the start of this century. It’s a TV screen that can roll up like wallpaper.

The effect is very similar to that of an unfurling projector screen, but when you switch the Signature OLED R on and begin watching, the projector comparisons lose quite a lot of validity. There’s a crispness and a sharpness to the LG’s images that is beyond all but the very best (and most expensive) projectors, and a brightness that eludes even the priciest. 

Anyone who’s seen any of LG’s very accomplished 2021 range of OLED TVs knows what I’m talking about: black levels are brilliantly deep, detailed and varied, the colour palette is extensive, edge definition is strong and there’s a profoundly impressive amount of detail on display.

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet illustrates the Signature OLED R’s talents brilliantly. Nolan may have overreached himself where narrative is concerned, but this is still a superb-looking movie – and in the LG’s hands a 4K Blu-ray disc copy loses none of that cinematic excellence. 

Images are lavishly detailed, endlessly nuanced and utterly stable. The most complex patterns are described faithfully, even the most testing motion is gripped with something approaching fanaticism. There isn’t an aspect of picture-making at which the LG doesn’t excel. It’s a match for the very best OLED TVs around. 

Now, while the very best OLED TVs around cost a tiny fraction of Signature OLED R money, the LG wouldn’t have been the first wildly expensive example of an exciting new technology to underwhelm where performance is concerned. But it’s safe to say the Signature OLED R doesn’t underwhelm. It whelms good and proper.

At least, it does as far as picture quality is concerned. Sound is a different matter. Given that it features six speaker drivers in a 4.2 arrangement, enjoys a total of 100 watts of power (15 per full-range driver and 20 for each ‘subwoofer’) and is mounted in a cabinet of generous displacement, the sound it delivers is weak, thin and confined. 

The ability to understand a Dolby Atmos soundtrack is all well and good, but when it’s rendered with as little substance and separation as the LG can muster it can’t help but disappoint. Hands up who was expecting to have to buy a separate sound system to accompany their £100K TV?

It seems unlikely that the few lucky souls who end up as Signature OLED R owners will watch much sub-4K content, but they can nevertheless rest assured the LG is a very competent upscaler. Some BBC iPlayer-derived highlights of Euro 2020 represent a double threat: 1080p content that requires upscaling, and the always-tricky demands of televised football. But the LG answers every question asked of it with almost casual authority: the upscaled images are detailed and impressively low-noise – and though motion seldom gets more testing than this, the LG handles it with real determination. 

LG has always been indulgent of next-gen gamers, and the Signature OLED R is no exception. Every exciting function and feature of Sony and Microsoft’s latest consoles is catered for, and a latency of less than 10m/s means there’s no significantly more responsive TV out there. Plus you can take all the positives regarding detail levels, low-light insight, security of motion-tracking and all the rest (as well as the negatives regarding sound) as read.

Despite all of this good stuff, though, the LG Signature OLED R remains, first and foremost, a television that costs £100,000. Does it justify that cost? Not in performance terms, no – not on your life. How could it? 

Jeong Seok Lee, head of LG’s global marketing centre, says that the price “takes into account the thousands of hours” that went into the development of the technology – and that each TV is assembled by hand. “The rollable TV will pave the way for future development of this technology and, in time, wider adoption,” he adds.

Wider adoption. That would be something to see. For now, though, the OLED R is about as good an OLED TV as you can currently buy. But you can buy an OLED TV of this size that’s every bit as capable for roughly 2.5 per cent of this price. Currently, this is a television that’s only for the obscenely rich and flagrantly ostentatious – and if that sounds like you, well, more power to you. LG has an OLED TV for you that’s the physical manifestation of the concept of ‘extravagance’.

For the rest of us, though – those of us for whom £2,500 spent on a new TV represents a significant investment – the LG Signature OLED R is more a trinket for extremely rich people. 

LG has demonstrated, without question, it can roll an OLED TV screen up without affecting its performance when it’s unrolled and working. It’s the first suggestion that ‘the rest of us’ can expect rollable televisions – probably OLED, but conceivably some other screen technology – to become relatively attainable and affordable sooner rather than later.

The LG Signature OLED R is available now for £99,999 - you can inquire to buy at LG. 

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK