Samsung is planning to release their ES9500 OLED TV in the second half of 2012. The 55-inch television will retail for nearly $9,000 and is set to rival LG's EM9600 OLED unit, a product that won CNET's Best of CES 2012 award earlier this year.
The OLED set will include Smart Dual View technology which will allow two different users to view two different 2D programs at the same time by wearing special 3D glasses. Sound will of course have to be fed through separate sets of headphones as to not distract the other viewer and vice versa. This feature is essentially the same thing that we saw earlier this year with Philips' 2012 television line-up.
Other key features include Smart Interaction, Smart Content and Smart Evolution. Smart Interaction provides gesture control, voice control and even face recognition. Smart Content is a generic term used to describe the wealth of content and apps available to the set while Samsung's Smart Evolution Kit allows the user to upgrade the television's dual-core processor to a quad-core or faster CPU each year as new hardware is introduced. Samsung says that this will keep your TV up-to-date with the latest hardware, firmware, software and interface.
The company plans to release the ES9500 in South Korea later this year before making the set available to customers in other regions. Expect the price of OLED TVs to drop significantly over the next few years as the technology and sets go mainstream, something that Samsung predicts won't happen for another two to three years.