How does the rollable TV work?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,702 words · ~8 min read
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our ces 2019 coverage is brought to you by dbrand their grip cases and prism
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at the link below so we are here in the lg secret meeting room whatever it is
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this was the only place that we could actually get close to this thing and it
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might not look like much we got a speaker bar thing here we got some art
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here and then two clicks of this button and bam
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we've got the rollable tv so this is their OLED tv r which is short for
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revolution but we really think they should call it the row led
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nothing nothing nothing
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all right so there's a few different ways you can use it you can use it
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completely unrolled you can use it up partially and there's kind of some smart
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applications you can see the time you can check the weather that kind of stuff
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or you can close it down entirely oh i believe the halfway up also has music
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support there's a there's a gallery thing that you can do you can even start
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your music playing roll the whole thing down and then you've just got this discreet looking speaker that blends in
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with pretty much anything not that of course you'd want to just use it as a
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speaker because this thing is one heck of a tv now you guys are probably
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thinking there's got to be some kind of compromise to the image quality because
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of making it rollable but in actuality this is exactly the same tech that we've
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always already seen i mean lg's been showing us their OLED panel technology
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and all kinds of different form factors for years now this is just the first
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time aside from that short-lived sort of curved tv thing that we saw for our bit
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there this is the first time that we've actually seen
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dynamic rolling in a consumer product
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and the way that they've done it is really cool so on the show floor we got
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a lot of b-roll of this thing but we weren't actually able to get that close to it well here we can so it's actually
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got these arms at the back that i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to lower
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it you can see what they're going to do is they're going to kind of fold onto themselves and then
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we can't really see exactly what's in here we know that there's a 4.2 100 watt
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speaker set we know all the i o and all the power
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for it is in here but we can't see exactly how tight the tv rolls up but we
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have to assume that it's going to be i guess as loosely as they can now there's
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a couple things about the mechanism that we do know we know that it's rated for
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50 000 rolls and unrolls so that would be four times a day for 32 years and we
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also know that it's extremely quiet that was a big question mark for us down on
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the show floor we weren't sure but uh yeah it's actually really impressive how
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quiet it is now back to things we don't know
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when they're gonna ship this thing uh how much it's gonna cost
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we could make some guesses given that this is their signature line and these
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are generally kind of supposed to be eye dropping
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oh my goodness as opposed to a great bang for the buck but frankly i'm not
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even gonna bother i'm just gonna sit here and admire the cool tech now we're
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about to head downstairs and check out the 8k displays that are supposed to come on sale later this year but first
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let's look at something that's really not ready for prime time it is a great
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demo so this is their 88 inch crystal sound OLED demo and behind the panel are
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five of what lg is calling exciters
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and it seems to be working basically
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there's three that are handling the mid-range on the bottom part of the
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panel and then two that are handling the highs and they're claiming that they're
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able to get 80 to i believe it was 140 kilohertz
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frequency response out of this thing but honestly that's not what really blew me
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away what blew me away was the positionality of the audio so whether
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it's for watching movies or games they've got some really great demos
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where you can really like you can like feel the ufo moving across the screen
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and somehow from bottom to top though i'm not sure exactly how they did that
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last part hopefully we're going to see this coming soon because then we can do
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away entirely with the speakers and all
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that other stuff i mean okay you'll still need to put your game
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console and like maybe your computer and your set top okay okay we're not doing
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away with all this other stuff but but no speakers now we're down on the
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floor and this is the z series yes the
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entire z series is one sku an 88 inch 8k
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OLED tv that has a number of kind of unique characteristics so number one is
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that it actually comes with this kind of artsy looking
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sort of frame style stand but you don't
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actually have to use it so we initially looked around the back of this thing and
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we were like oh that's kind of that kind of sucks because there's no vase amount
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there's no way to like really do cable management in a in a meaningful way and
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what if this height isn't right for you what if you want like a shorter or
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a taller stand so as it turns out the way that it actually works is you can
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take the whole thing off of the stand and it's got these kind of downward
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firing speakers and reflectors so you can just run it as a standalone tv if
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you want or you can put it on the stand now there's not a ton that we really
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know about it it's got their new alpha 9 gen 2 processor which helps with 4k to
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8k upscaling as well as it uses ai to
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like do better noise reduction and all that kind of
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stuff and we don't really know when it's going to be available and we don't know
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pricing oh
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hi sorry i mean hey guys
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you know you're not going to be able to get away from that until you stop saying it shout out to Linus kind of i'm just
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going to like jump off a second he's got an lg gram with his notes right beside
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the camera right now can you just show i'm not even hiding it that's really
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impressive i memorized my notes i have to check my
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phone like every five seconds to memorize my notes that's very impressive that's not memorized that's checking
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your phone every five seconds and then i have to memorize
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so the launch is supposed to be sometime in q2 we have no price and it's got
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google assistant and alexa so here's a bit of a better look at the
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fancy stand so that panel in the middle seems like it comes off for a vase
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amount and then that panel gives us the i o we don't really know how this like
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cable management they've got going on here works but that's all kind of tbd
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what has a more basic stand is their nano cell 8k tv so just like that one
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the entire lineup here is one model a 75
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inch model that's 8k nano cell equipped with the same alpha 9 gen 2 processor
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and their local dimming pro which has twice as many dimming zones as their
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non-pro but we don't know how many the non-pro has so it's not that meaningful
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we have no brightness numbers on this but uh same thing should be available
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later this year what's not available later this year because it's available
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now is the dbrand grip the dbrand grip is the super lifeproof case from dbrand
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it's precision cut so it's got cutouts for your camera fingerprint sensor
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whatever else you need it's got their trademark super clicky buttons and of
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course it's dbrand so you can customize it with one of their true textured 3m
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vinyl skins in whatever look suits you best the really cool thing that's
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totally unlike anything they've done before though is their prison screen
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protectors these things are kind of unbelievable they've got this really neat applicator that makes it so you can
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put it on perfect every time and the impact resistance that this adds to your
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display absolutely blew me away nothing in the demo is staged you put it on you
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hammer a nail in with it you take the thing off and your screen is still
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pristine underneath i mean obviously there are limitations if you were to you
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know hit it with a sledgehammer yes you would you would shatter your entire
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phone not just the screen but i've never seen anything quite like this in terms
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of just a slap on screen protection product so check it out at the link in
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the video description guys don't miss any of our ces 2019 coverage um probably
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the rest of it that you see will be after the show actually opens and
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there's not like sky jacks all over the place but yeah who knows