LG's DVLED Extreme Home Cinema uses LEDs for individual pixels, and can be scaled from 108 to 325 inches. But it starts at $70,000 and goes up from there.

Samsung has made some waves in the last few years with its The Wall video wall, a MicroLED display designed for both commercial installations and (very) high-end home theaters, which uses individual LED clusters for each pixel. Now LG has revealed its own home entertainment video wall, the DVLED Extreme Home Cinema.

DVLED stands for Direct View LED (which itself stands for light-emitting diodes), and it appears to be LG's version of Samsung's MicroLED display technology. Like MicroLED, DVLED generates a picture by using LEDs at a per-pixel level.

This is a significant difference from widely available LED TVs, which are better described as LED-backlit LCD TVs. The LED TVs you can find at Best Buy (and reviewed on our site) create an image using a liquid crystal display (LCD) layer, which is then backlit by arrays of LEDs because LCD itself doesn't produce light. Both MicroLED and DVLED (and for that matter OLED, which is a completely different picture technology) form pictures and emit light on the same component level, instead of using separate mechanisms for those two purposes.

If all of that seems a bit confusing, it boils down to this: DVLED and MicroLED completely control the light and color of each pixel individually, while most TVs control the amount of light that comes out in much larger patches, if not uniformly across the entire screen. In theory, it means these newer display technologies can offer far superior pictures, especially in terms of contrast. The use of LEDs also means extreme longevity for the Extreme Home Cinema, and LG states that the technology can last 100,000 hours before reaching half-life, at which point components could realistically start to fail.

Using clusters of tiny LEDs means screens can be easily scaled up without needing to deal with the difficulties of manufacturing single LCD panels for each size, though the size of these LEDs is limiting. The Extreme Home Cinema, for example, is available in nine different sizes and three separate resolutions, from a 108-inch 1080p display to a 325-inch 8K one.

This isn't quite the flexibility offered by Samsung's The Wall, which can be scaled up to 1,000 inches and arranged in non-standard aspect ratios, but again The Wall is designed for commercial displays as well as home entertainment. Home theater owners will probably want to stick with standard resolutions and uniform aspect ratios like 16:9 or 32:9 ultrawide, and those are the options the LG Extreme Home Cinema provides.

Don't expect to get an Extreme Home Cinema at any store, though. Like Samsung's The Wall, LG's LED home theater wall is only available through custom installation dealers, and is priced on the very, very high end of home cinema displays. The MSRP of an Extreme Home Cinema ranges from $70,000 for the smallest 1080p screen to $1,700,000 for the 325-inch 8K one.

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I’ve been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over 10 years, covering both TVs and everything you might want to connect to them. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand different consumer electronics products including headphones, speakers, TVs, and every major game system and VR headset of the last decade. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and a THX-certified home theater professional, and I’m here to help you understand 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and even 8K (and to reassure you that you don’t need to worry about 8K at all for at least a few more years).

Home theater technology (TVs, media streamers, and soundbars)

Smart speakers and smart displays

I test TVs with a Klein K-80 colorimeter, a Murideo SIX-G signal generator, a HDFury Diva 4K HDMI matrix, and Portrait Displays’ Calman software. That’s a lot of complicated equipment specifically for screens, but that doesn’t cover what I run on a daily basis.

I use an Asus ROG Zephyr 14 gaming laptop as my primary system for both work and PC gaming (and both, when I review gaming headsets and controllers), along with an aging Samsung Notebook 7 as my portable writing station. I keep the Asus laptop in my home office, with a Das Keyboard 4S and an LG ultrawide monitor attached to it. The Samsung laptop stays in my bag, along with a Keychron K8 mechanical keyboard, because I’m the sort of person who will sit down in a coffee shop and bust out not only a laptop, but a separate keyboard. Mechanical just feels better.

For my own home theater, I have a modest but bright and accurate TCL 55R635 TV and a Roku Streambar Pro; bigger and louder would usually be better, but not in a Brooklyn apartment. I keep a Nintendo Switch dock connected to it, along with a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X so I can test any peripheral that comes out no matter what system it’s for. I also have a Chromecast With Google TV for general content streaming.

As for mobile gear, I’m surprisingly phone-ambivalent and have swapped between iPhones and Pixels from generation to generation. I favor the iPhone for general snapshots when I need to take pictures of products or cover events, but I also have a Sony Alpha A6000 camera for when I feel like photo walking.

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