LG’s CES TV pre-announcements: smarter, faster, bigger … and more connected — December 31, 2012

Drool now or drool later, but LG just announced more details about its 2013 TV lineup, which will be unveiled at CES in a week.

For 2013 the Korean company is focusing on smart-TV enhancements like Smart Home, melding TV and web with quick access to apps, content, news sites, and weather, and Magic Remote, which allows you to control your TV by pointing Nintendo-Wii-style, or scrolling, or gesturing, or simply talking to your TV to change the channel or search for content.

LG is also enhancing what the company calls Smart Sharing to allow owners to transfer, mirror, or share content to and from smartphones, tablets, and other devices, and LG Cloud, which will enable streaming content from just about anywhere.

All of which is interesting. But the real lust-worthy item on display at LG’s CES booth will be the company’s 84-inch Ultra HD television, which just launched in late October.

This TV isn’t just room-dwarfingly gargantuan, it’s also got four times the resolution of standard high-definition TVs, with 3,840 horizontal pixels combining with 2,160 vertical pixels to provide a very, very sweet 8,294,400 pixels of silky smooth video pleasure. That’s 3.1 million pixels more than in an Apple 15″ MacBook Pro with Retina display (although, of course, on a much bigger screen).

But get ready to hit up the boss for a raise — that 84″ Ultra HD TV will set you back a budget-busting $20,000.

To drive all this wealth of pixels and new intelligence, LG is updating the brains of their TVs, boosting CPU speeds by 120 percent and GPUs by 300 percent, which the company says will translate to clearer images.

You’ll need that extra power, since the new Ultra HD resolution is completely unsupported by any content recorded at such high quality … so the TV depends on upconverting to provide a semblance of what higher high-def would look like.

A couple other welcome notes:

LG’s new “Cinema Screen” design ethos means smaller bezels, providing more TV with less frame, and a better 3D experience with less flicker.

We’ll have more on all the latest CES announcement as the VentureBeat team CES team hits the road for Vegas shortly.

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