The LG Rollable OLED TV is too expensive – but you're not missing much if you can't afford it

LG recently announced that finally, three years after its debut at CES 2018, the LG Rollable OLED TV R is finally available for folks to purchase.

The asking price? A cool $100,000 (around £72,000, AU$135,000). I’m not sure what your bank account looks like, but mine certainly doesn’t have that many zeros in it.

The good news here is that, even if you’re not Richard Branson or Elon Musk who can afford these types of lavish purchases, you’re not actually missing much in terms of performance: although the rollable part of the screen is novel and unique, the panel itself is similar to the one we’ve seen on the LG W-Series OLED for the last two years, and this year’s newest Gallery Series OLED – the LG G1 OLED – has an even brighter panel. 

Long story short, even though it certainly won’t raise as many eyebrows at your next dinner party, the plain ol’ LG C1 OLED that came out earlier this year is as competent a 4K TV as the LG Rollable OLED and will deliver the same picture performance.

So what is the future of OLED TVs?

Well, LG Display – LG's subsidiary company that specializes in panel design and fabrication – seems to be heading toward brighter screens. That's a great thing since OLED TVs have always been a bit dimmer than QLED TVs. 

The benefit of these new OLED panels is that they'll retain the perfect black levels you know and love about OLED – just with a higher peak brightness when it comes to really intense action scenes, explosions and sunlight. 

Another way up the proverbial mountain of picture performance is something called QD-OLED or Quantum Dot Organic Light Emitting Diode screens that take the color saturation provided by a Quantum Dot film over an OLED panel. That's something that Samsung is reportedly hard at work engineering at the moment, but not something we've seen for ourselves.

The last innovation we'll see for OLED moving forward are new form factors like the Rollable OLED TV R. In fact, LG teased a whole bunch at this year's online-only CES like a transparent OLED that sits at the bottom of your bed. 

We're hoping, however, that when LG eventually does release that bed it won't cost more than our house...

• Looking to jump over to OLED? Don't miss our guide to the best OLED TV