LG to start producing more W-OLED gaming screens

I never thought I’d see the day, but it seems manufacturers may be uncertain about the future of the large household TV, and are instead looking to the PC monitor for the future of screens. Surprisingly, it looks like one such company is LG, a brand known for producing some of the most popular TVs around, even taking out our best gaming TV award (opens in new tab) with the LG OLED48CX. (opens in new tab) Still it’s an interesting move from a company that recently announced both the biggest and smallest OLED gaming TVs on the market (opens in new tab).

According to reports received by OLED-info (opens in new tab), the electronics giant is going to focus on producing white OLED or WOLED panels predominantly around 40 inches. This has a focus on smaller TVs, but also clearly on gaming monitors as the brand plans to start producing 27-inch WOLEDs by the end of this month, with displays hopefully in the wild in Q1 of next year in LGE screens.

When it comes to screens, WOLED can be a bit of a mixed bag. Thanks to the white backlight they can pacify colours and sometimes not have blacks as deep. In saying that, LG has already been using WOLED tech for many of its TVs and they tend to be great for deep blacks and HDR so far. Plus they add gaming features like app support for Nvidia’s GeForce Now (opens in new tab). As far as track records go, we’re expecting some nice panels. Still, it’d be nice to see these smaller panels in action to see how they handle up-close experiences.

The hope is that these new WOLED screens from LG will also come with a nicer price tag. Current OLED monitors of this size from LG are packed with Japan OLED standard panels and a bunch of other features leading to fairly expensive pieces of kit. If LG is producing its own panels this time around, hopefully that will lead to cheaper manufacturing and the passing of those savings onto consumers. 

For now LG has just launched the 48GQ900-B UltraGear 48-inch UHD 4K OLED gaming monitor (opens in new tab) in Australia with an RRP of $AU2,599. This has been out for a while in other parts of the world and sports an official refresh rate of 120 Hz, or up to 138 Hz if you switch it into overclocked mode. Given that delay in release though, it could be that Aussies won’t see these new WOLED screens for a little while. 

This comes during an interesting time for gaming monitors. This year we’ve seen HyperX join the scene with new gaming monitors that come standard with VESA arms (opens in new tab). Corsair announced that wild bending monitor (opens in new tab), which happens to use an LG-provided panel. It turns out this is the same OLED LG is packing into its new LG UltraGear 240 Hz curved OLED (opens in new tab) screen, which was only announced a few months back. It feels like things are moving very quickly in the monitor world right now, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.