LG's gamer-oriented 48-inch CX OLED TV will see worldwide availability in June
by Bogdan SolcaThe smaller OLED TV panels are clearly tailored for PC gamers and console gamers. These will most likely be even more sought after once the next gen consoles and the new wave of HDMI 2.1 GPUs from Nvidia / AMD land later this year.
Due to the ongoing worldwide pandemic, the availability of LG’s 2020 X-series OLED TVs has suffered a slight delay of a couple of months. Back at CES this year, LG announced that it would introduce a 48-inch size for the CX family, and this got gamers excited as the panel size reduction would also mean a considerable price cut compared to the 55-inch option. Expected to drop worldwide in early May with the 55-inch, 65-inch and 77-inch variants, the 48-inch CX OLED is now only available in the UK, but LG reassured everyone that it will finally see availability in key European and Asian markets by June. The U.S. market might have to wait a little bit longer, maybe late June - early July.
The addition of a 48-inch OLED model is important because it proves that LG is open to diversify it’s form-factor suite, also opening up more price points. With smaller sizes, LG can now target not only console gamers, but PC gamers, as well. Based on the UK £1,499 pricing, we are expecting the 48-inch CX OLED to cost around 1,690 Euro in the EU and around $1,860 in the U.S.
According to the latest HDTVTest review of the 55-inch CX OLED TV, the 2020 models are generally better than the 2019 ones when it comes to gaming as the latency has been lowered to 13 ms for 60 Hz refresh rates and even 6-7 ms for 120 Hz refresh rates. However, the reviewer does note that the HDMI 2.1 connections are now capped to 40 Gbps instead of 48 Gbps, yet this has been proved to be a non-issue as far as picture quality is concerned. Sound quality might be somewhat affected because these models do not support DTS master audio over eARC anymore. Additionally, it looks like the current firmware has a few bugs such as VRR mode causing default gamma to be brighter above black, while enabling PC mode to obtain 4:4:4 chroma introduces posterization artifacts in HDR movie content.
These bugs will hopefully be fixed with a future firmware update in a few months. We are also expecting less near-black vertical banding with the 48-inch models, since the smaller panels usually tend to have better uniformity.
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