Michael Crider
It’s just typical, isn’t it: two weeks after I give up my years-long wait for OLED panels to finally hit mainstream monitors and plunk down a bundle for a gaming IPS screen, LG announces its first OLED monitor. Today the LG UltraFine OLED Pro was revealed at the CES 2021 virtual event.
The OLED Pro 32EP950 is a 31.5-inch 4K display with USB-C, HDMI, and dual DisplayPort inputs, as well as three USB-A ports, 90-watt power delivery, and the semi-standard headphone jack for connecting external speakers. But all of that is almost literal background to the screen panel itself, which LG claims has 99% Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 color accuracy, a one million-to-one contrast ratio, and the “perfect” blacks and deep HDR that comes with OLED screen tech.
While we’re starting to see more and more OLED laptops, to date, there have only been a handful of OLED monitors released to the market, all of them either weirdly small, obscenely expensive, or both. Aside from a few OLED TVs that purported to be “gaming displays,” most of them have gone out of production. That’s why LG’s announcement is so interesting: the UltraFine OLED Pro, coming from both a prolific manufacturer of computer monitors and the world’s biggest producer of OLED screen panels, will probably get at least a full production cycle.
Based on its video debut, LG is aiming this monitor squarely at content creation professionals, not video junkies or gamers. (It’s telling that there was no mention of refresh rate or response time.) There’s no word on a release date or price, but guessing on LG’s current product cycles, I’d be willing to bet “sometime in 2021” and “more than $2000.”
