A new report out of South Korea claims Samsung Display is working on making its displays thinner and more flexible with the intent of creating rollable QD-OLED screens.
Sources who spoke to The Elec claim that development of the next-generation QD-OLED panels are underway and that the “aim is to reduce the use of glass substrates from the current two to one” allowing the new version to be rollable.
Samsung Display is of course different from Samsung Electronics, the makers of the commercial TVs you can buy at your local electronics store, but the technology of the former usually makes it into the products of the latter.
If that’s the case here, we could be looking forward to a rollable QD-OLED TV from Samsung Electronics in the near future.
Rollable is nice - but so far it’s very expensive
The only rollable, commercially available TV out there right now is the LG RX Rollable Series OLED that the company debuted at CES 2019 and released a year later in 2020.
The price of that 65-inch model comes in at $87,000 / €60,000 - and you’ll need to special order it directly from the manufacturer through a custom installer.
Should Samsung follow through with its plans to create a QD-OLED version of a rollable TV there’s no telling how much it would cost. Unfortunately, though, if current QD-OLED prices are anything to go by it’s unlikely to be significantly cheaper than the LG RX that’s out right now. (Samsung’s S95B OLED is several hundred dollars more than LG’s 2022 OLED lineup when compared side-by-side.)
That said, if Samsung can figure out a cheaper housing for the screen we might finally be able to get a rollable OLED in our house without having to take out a second mortgage.
