Xiaomi made a transparent OLED TV — and it’s actually for sale

Xiaomi is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a slew of new products, including phones, scooters, and the usual Xiaomi fare. Arguably the most interesting of these, however, is a new OLED TV.

Sure, OLED TVs are common these days, but this one has a trick up its sleeve: it’s transparent.

Verbosely named the Mi TV LUX OLED Transparent Edition, the TV literally lets you see through the screen, allowing you to keep an eye on your shows as well as whatever is behind the TV. And no, this isn’t just vaporware: you can actually buy it starting August 16 for approximately $7,200 — if you live in China, anyway (¥49,999).

Xiaomi claims s it’s the only Chinese company capable of mass-producing atransparent TV of this caliber. Despite the newfangled technology, it seems like it’s actually a decent TV too– in the right conditions, anyway. It features a 55-inch OLED transparent (duh) display with 93% DCI-P3 color support and 120 Hz refresh rate. Xiaomi says it has “a 150,000:1 static contrast ratio and an infinite dynamic contrast ratio” though in practice that’ll, of course, depend on what’s actually behind the TV.

Because of the transparent display, Xiaomi moved all the processing components of the TV to the base of the display, so this isn’t a unit you’ll be mounting to a wall. Of course, your viewing experience will be affected by what’s behind the display, as the screen cannot become completely opaque — you might want to have a dark surface behind the TV.

Okay, so this isn’t the most practical viewing experience, nevermind the $7,000+ price tag. Still, it feels like the future; who knows, maybe 20 years from now we’ll all have unnecessarily transparent screens.

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Published August 11, 2020 — 17:34 UTC