Do you remember crowding around a television to watch big rugby matches in the 2000’s, squinting at a fuzzy, standard-definition broadcast on a bulky box in the corner of the room? We held our breath at every penalty, but the picture itself was a ghost of the real thing – a flicker of colour and motion. Now, picture watching the next final. The scene is the same, but the window you’re looking through is entirely different. You see the precise shade of green on the field, the individual droplets of sweat, the perfect, inky black of the night sky behind the stadium lights.
That leap from a blurry memory to a hyper-realistic experience wasn’t an accident. It’s the result of a quiet, two-decade revolution in the living room, a relentless quest to turn the television screen from a mere display into a perfect window on the world.
The first great breakthrough was the move from heavy Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) sets to flat-screen Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) technology. This shift, driven by innovators like LG, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of LCD panels, was monumental. By shining a backlight through a panel of liquid crystals, televisions could suddenly be hung on a wall, freeing our homes from the tyranny of the box and making bigger screens possible.
The technology didn’t stand still, though. Next came Light Emitting Diode (LED) backlights. While still technically LCD TVs, this refinement used a more precise and energy-efficient light source. This allowed for advancements like local dimming, where parts of the backlight could be turned off to create deeper blacks, inching us ever closer to a truly lifelike picture.
But the true game-changer, the quantum leap in the quest for realism, arrived with OLED – Organic Light Emitting Diode. This was a complete reimagining of how a screen could work, and LG pioneered the commercialisation of OLED TVs, introducing the world’s first large 55-inch OLED TV in 2013. The principle of OLED is elegantly simple. Unlike LCD/LED TVs that require a separate backlight, each individual pixel in an OLED screen creates its own light.
The implications of this are staggering. When a pixel needs to be black, it simply turns off completely. This results in perfect, absolute black, a feat that backlit screens can never truly achieve. Against this perfect black, every other colour appears more vibrant and intense. It creates “infinite contrast,” providing a level of depth and realism that is breathtakingly immersive.
Today, this technology has reached its zenith with the LG OLED evo range. Models like the stunning LG OLED evo G5, with its “Gallery Design,” sit flush against the wall like a piece of art. Meanwhile, the celebrated LG OLED evo C5 continues to be the benchmark for all-round performance, beloved by cinephiles and gamers alike. At 86 inches and 4K resolution, that means the C5 has 8.3 million individual, self-lit organic LED’s that create the image you see – each less than 0.34mm across.
Powered by LG’s advanced AI processors, these TVs do even more to improve the image, though; they analyse and optimise it in real-time.
The 20-year journey, from the fuzzy broadcasts of yesterday to the self-lit pixels of today, has been one of relentless innovation. The quest to capture reality on a screen is further along than could be imagined just two decades ago, all the while transforming our living room televisions into true windows on the world.