Future Tech: LG Redefines Tube TV With Rollable Screens

Photo: Artiga Photo (Getty Images)

In most modern living rooms, the TV is the centerpiece. Whether you’re gaming, lounging, or sharing a viral video, you want to be sitting right in front of the biggest screen in the house. Of course, that also means that the entire room becomes the TV room, even if you’re using it to read or solve crossword puzzles. That’s a problem, especially if you’re living in a small apartment on a fixed income. If said income is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can solve said problem with LG’s futuristic rolling TV model.

Measuring in at over 60 inches when fully unfurled, the LG rollable TV first showcased at CES 2018 can shift itself to fit any need. You’ll want the full screen for big media, but you probably don’t need all the real estate for playing music. So, this screen will shrink down to a small rectangle and just display relevant information. This also works for its interactive smart features, letting you get all your relevant weather information in a slick rectangle rather than a blown out full-screen forecast.

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Are you one of the thousands of Americans suffering from the delusion that the bars on widescreen movies ruin your experience? You’re in luck! LG’s rollable TV can make the screen fit the movie, so you can only see your favorite actors and not a distracting void of nothingness. While we imagine that this might be something that will have to be coded into digital movies going forward, it’s a slick implementation that could work if the technology catches on at large. Unless something goes horribly wrong, we don’t see why it wouldn’t.

While it is rather showy, having a screen that disappears into itself is much more useful than adding a curve to it. Heck, go back twenty years, you’d see a similar setup on any random episode of MTV Cribs. The difference is that those setups took normal unwieldy TVs and put them into huge mechanisms. While LG’s newspaper screen isn’t going to be cheap, it’s certainly a much more elegant solution than that.

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While LG has been prototyping roll-up televisions for years now, 2019 seems to be the year where it will hit store shelves for the first time. The model shown at last year’s conference looked ready to go on the shelves at your local retailer, although that probably won’t happen until a few cheaper iterations down the line. For now, it’s a cool reminder that televisions don’t always have to get bigger to get better.