First spotted back in January 2018, and followed by a closer look in August at IFA, model 88Z9 was launched in South Korea back in June of this year. LG promised a roll out in North America and Europe would follow in Q3 and now that time has arrived. The devil is in the detail, as they say, and the company says that its monster television exceeds the demanding picture quality criteria of the Information Display Measurements Standard to produce "real 8K."
That Standard says that a stated resolution means much more than mere pixel counts, and requires neighboring pixels to be distinguishable from each other – something called the Contrast Modulation measurement – in order to make the grade. This CM value needs to be greater than 25 percent for images and 50 percent for text. LG's Signature OLED 8K television has CM values "in the 90 percent range," which LG says will result in users being able "to actually experience all of the additional detail in the 8K content."
"The new 8K TVs show that LG is deeply committed to providing consumers with real 8K as defined by established display industry standards," said LG's Brian Kwon. "LG 8K OLED and NanoCell TVs aren’t just TVs with more pixels, they also deliver all of our latest display technologies."
Model 88Z9 boasts 33 million self-emitting pixels, an almost bezel-free design, and an integrated 80 W speaker system. For its release into the global marketplace, it's joined by the 75-inch 8K NanoCell TV, which surpasses the CM values to deliver "real 8K" too, but also employs Nano Color to enhance color reproduction and filter out impurities and Nano Black to control backlighting for improved contrast and deep, deep blacks.
Both models feature Cinema HDR, have four HDMI 2.1 ports, and can of course upscale lower resolution content with the help of LG's Alpha 9 Gen 2 8K intelligent processor, which uses deep learning to tap into a huge source database for picture and sound optimization.
The Signature OLED 8K and 8K NanoCell models are being made available this month to over 140 markets around the world, starting with Australia, Germany, France, the UK and the US. Pricing hasn't been mentioned at this time.
Source: LG