Thin enough

At the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, LG Display (http://www.lgdisplay.com) will be showing what is said to be the world’s thinnest LCD. Intended for use in wall-mounted TVs, the 42-in. prototype panel is only 2.6 mm thick. It also weighs less than 4 kg and has full HD (1,920 x 1,080-pixel) resolution with a 120-Hz refresh rate.

LG Display’s 2.6-mm-thick LCD panel

Previously, Sony had held the “world’s thinnest TV” title with the 11-in.-diagonal, 3-mm-thick XEL-1 OLED TV introduced in the fall of 2007. LG’s TV, on the other hand, uses LCD technology with LED backlighting, staying in the mainstream of display technology. (Although OLED technology really began to take off in the third quarter of 2009, according to DisplaySearch’s Quarterly OLED Shipment and Forecast Report, http://tiny.cc/34HBu.)

LG’s new introduction tops its previous best-thickness of 5.9 mm announced in May, which followed the unveiling of a 6.5-mm-thick LCD TV by Samsung at last year’s CES. And, to provide a something of a timeline for this shrinking dimension, the thickness being touted by LG today is an order of magnitude thinner than the 29-mm-thick LCD prototype that Sharp unveiled as the world’s thinnest TV in August 2007.

It wouldn’t be surprising if some other company were to shave fractions of a millimeter off LG’s current record to go for “thinnest” bragging rights, but frankly we seem to have reached the practical limits for wall-mount-TV design. Making the panel significantly thinner today wouldn’t provide any particular advantage, and might actually make the panel more difficult to work with, in terms of structural rigidity.

I think it’s fair to say that flat-panel TVs are getting to the point where they are thin enough, and that it’s time to start innovating in other areas, like making the technology affordable to a larger public.

Richard Comerford

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At CES this week, LG will be showing a 42-in. LCD panel only 2.6 mm thick.