CE Week attendees and video industry professionals picked OLED over LCD at the Value Electronics TV Shootout in New York last week. LG’s Signature 77G6P OLED TV was voted the best TV among flagship displays against Samsung’s UN78SK9800, Sony’s XBR-75X940D and Vizio’s RS65, said Value Electronics owner Robert Zohn. The TVs were set up and calibrated by professionals in day and night viewing modes on an equal playing field, said Zohn, an authorized dealer for all of the competing brands. Sony’s XBR-75X940D won the overall day performance category and was runner-up in the shootout, Zohn said. The contenders competed on black quality, perceived contrast, color accuracy, off-axis performance, screen uniformity, high dynamic range/wide color gamut, overall day and overall night performance -- all important to the TV buying decision, said Zohn. Results are available on the Value Electronics website.

LG is taking OLED TVs to the hospitality market, it said Wednesday at the Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition & Conference (HITEC) in New Orleans. LG’s upscaling 4K 55-inch and 65-inch TVs are the first OLED TVs designed specifically for hotel rooms, said the company. The hotel TVs incorporate Pro:Idiom, a Zenith-designed digital rights management system that provides end-to-end cryptographic security for protecting digital HD and SD video and music transmitted over private cable TV systems and private IP networks. The hotel TVs also include LG’s Pro:Centric interactive TV platform and embedded b-LAN (broadband local area network) capability. LG’s webOS 3.0 Smart TV platform is said to simplify the process of switching among content options: broadcast TV, streaming services and external devices. In addition, LG is showing at HITEC OLED commercial displays: dual-view HD flat and curved 4K tiling displays for digital signage applications, it said. LG also announced Wednesday a campaign to make the northern lights, the aurora borealis, visible to audiences worldwide via its HDR-enabled 4K OLED TVs. LG plans to showcase the OLED aurora borealis at an event in Reykjavik, Iceland, July 20, which includes a concert by Iceland’s Of Monsters and Men. Forty large-screen OLED TVs installed in the Harpa concert hall will display the Icelandic night sky on “perfectly black screens,” giving attendees, who would not otherwise be able to see the northern lights in the extended Icelandic summer daylight, a view of them, the company said.

Digital image enhancement company DarbeeVision joined the Ultra HD Forum, it said. The company’s Darbee Visual Presence technology is said to enhance the depth, clarity and realism of 4K/UHD pictures or videos. “Although 4K pictures are stunning, they are still flat,” said DarbeeVision President Larry Pace. The company is planning to release its technology “very soon” and joining the Ultra HD Forum will allow DarbeeVision to “participate in the conversations that shape how the industry moves together to create the best UHD experience possible,” he said. The Ultra HD Forum is a mix of more than 50 service providers, technology and infrastructure vendors, consultants and studios.

BeIN Media is using Technicolor's Ultra HD technology in its Middle East and North Africa broadcast platform, in advance of the Union of European Football Associations Euro 2016 tournament, it said in a news release Thursday. It said the deal between the two has its 4K set-top box technology being used in beIN's 4K UHD receiver, while beIN is broadcasting a number of the Euro tournament's games in 4K on a dedicated channel, beIN 4K.

Philips brand license partner P&F USA will bundle an Ultra HD Blu-ray version of Warner’s Creed with the Philips BDP7501 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player that goes on sale later this month, said the company in a Monday email alert. The Creed bonus disc, with HDR, will be available in a $399 combo pack through September, it said. Monday's word of the Creed bundle comes three weeks after P&F said it planned "no announcement" about any software bundles it might offer in support of the BDP7501 hardware rollout (see 1605180066).

Microsoft's new line of Xbox One S machines will be the industry's first videogame consoles to support Ultra HD Blu-ray playback and high dynamic range, the company said in a Monday announcement at E3. Three versions of Xbox One S, also supporting 4K and HDR playback of physical and streamed games and video, became available for preorder Monday and will arrive in stores in August, Microsoft said. They include a 500-GB Xbox One S at $299, a 1 TB version at $349 and a 2 TB version, available only in "select markets," at $399. Microsoft representatives didn't comment whether the HDR functionality in Xbox One S will be based on the open HDR10 system or on a proprietary HDR system like Dolby Vision. The Ultra HD Blu-ray format provides for HDR10 as a mandatory base-layer feature, with the proprietary Dolby Vision and the Philips HDR systems provided for as optional enhancements (see 1507230049).

Laser 4K video projectors are in the spotlight at InfoComm in Las Vegas this week. Optoma bowed two single-chip DLP laser phosphor projectors for the Pro AV and home markets. The company hasn’t named what it called the “world’s first DLP 4K laser phosphor ultra-short-throw projector” that can display a 100-inch image on a screen from two inches away. The Android 5.0-based projector supports H.265 multimedia playback and is slated for delivery in Q1, Optoma said. Optoma plans to deliver in late 2016 and early 2017 “a handful of solid-state laser projectors" said to provide high picture quality -- R/G/B/Y color elements yielding "natural and vivid color performance" -- along with stability and reliability. Laser phosphor technology eliminates the need for lamp and filter replacements and can offer 20,000 hours of operation, said Optoma. Focusing on the professional market, Panasonic unveiled its latest flagship three-chip DLP Solid Shine Laser 4K projector for large-venue entertainment applications. The PT-RQ32KU offers 27,000-lumen brightness at 5120 x 3200-pixel resolution, it said. Vivitek is showing for the first time its 100-inch 4K laser DLP display, while parent company Delta Group is demonstrating a 140-inch 8K laser DLP rear-projection cube video wall. The video wall comprises two 70-inch 4K laser-lit video wall cubes, said the company.

DVIGear will demonstrate its DisplayNet 10-gigabit Ethernet technology at InfoComm this week, said the company. DisplayNet switches, extends and distributes uncompressed AV signals in real time at resolutions up to 4K Ultra HD with zero frame latency, compression or artifacts, DVIGear said. Applications include “limitless” matrix switching and video wall displays, it said. DVI Gear also is showing active optical cables that can extend DisplayPort v1.2 4K signals up to 328 feet and a fiber optic extender that supports HDMI 1.4 (or DVI) with or without HDCP, RS-232, bidirectional IR, 10/100 Ethernet and balanced or unbalanced audio over a single optical cable, said the company.

Though adoption of Ultra HD TVs began to “ramp up” only in 2015, consumer awareness of the technology is high, NPD said in a Wednesday report. Fifty-two percent consumers canvassed by NPD in January and February said they were aware of Ultra HD TVs, the research firm said. That figure “spikes” to 73 percent among consumers who own an internet-connected TV, NPD said. Increased consumer desire for and awareness of 4K streaming-video services has accompanied the growing adoption of 4K TVs, it said. A third of consumers surveyed are already aware of 4K streaming services, it said. Awareness increases to 42 percent among 18-to-34-year-olds, it said. NPD surveyed 5,000 consumers.

Best Buy’s “market-leading customer experience” on Ultra HD in large-screen TVs “continued to drive sales growth and market share gains” in its fiscal Q1, CEO Hubert Joly said on a Tuesday earnings call. “We continue to build on this experience” as Best Buy rolls out 376 new LG stores within a store, in addition to its existing Sony and Samsung partnerships, Joly said. E-commerce revenue jumped 23.9 percent in the quarter to $832 million, prompting one questioner to ask Joly if Best Buy plans physical store closures as a result. “In a context where revenue, total revenue, would be flat, then yes, it would put pressure on the economics in the business,” Joly responded. “If you are going to buy a 4K TV, the only way to see the quality of the picture and ask questions is really in the store,” he said. Best Buy gained TV share in the quarter, “and we’d expect to, based on the premium experience that we have to offer the customer in our store,” outgoing Chief Financial Officer Sharon McCollam(see 1605240052) said in Q&A. “We continue with the tremendous partnership that we have with Samsung and Sony and LG, et cetera. With our partnerships, we have an exceptional experience in our stores. These are still new technologies for all the customers that are buying new 4K TVs and we are continuing to offer the customer a very, very strong experience and I think that’s differentiating us from others.” But Joly chimed in to caution that Best Buy’s TV sales growth likely won’t be sustainable. Historically, Best Buy has done “particularly well” during the “first part” of any new TV product cycle, he said. “Then as the technology gets more mass, then it gets into more places,” he said. “And at some point, the growth in TVs will slow down,” and it’s doubtful Best Buy will “be able to hold the kind of great share we’ve had," he said. "We are not surrendering in advance, but as investors, you guys have been around, you know that this is the kind of thing that happens. So when it happens, don’t be surprised.”