LG has confirmed the OLED evo W6 for South Africa, and at 9.95mm thick it’s the closest thing to glass on a wall the TV industry has ever shipped. Only 77 and 83 inch models are coming, through selected retail partners and the LG Online Store, and there’s still no rand price attached. My take is blunt: this is a genuinely remarkable object arriving at exactly the wrong moment for anyone sensible with money.
The W6 resurrects LG’s Wallpaper line from 2017, unveiled at CES in January with all inputs moved onto a separate Zero Connect Box that beams visually lossless 4K and audio up to ten metres. TÜV Rheinland certified it as the world’s first true wireless lossless display, covering colour accuracy, HDR tone and input lag tolerance at up to 165Hz. On paper, it’s the whole package.
Thin is the story, but read the footnotes
Here’s the detail that punctures the marketing: 9.95mm is actually thicker than the 2017 W7 it replaces. Nine years of progress and the flagship got fatter, because the wireless transmission hardware had to move into the panel itself. “World’s thinnest” only survives if you forget the original existed.
And “wireless” deserves a fact-check of its own. The panel still plugs into mains power, and so does the Zero Connect Box. This is cable reduction, not electrical wizardry. Worse, the power lead exits the side of the panel rather than the centre, which breaks every pre-built central conduit in the country and can force the set slightly off-wall. A truly flush mount demands a flat, well-prepared wall, and most South African plasterwork isn’t.
And there isn’t a single HDMI port on the panel. Your decoder, console and streaming stick all live on the Zero Connect Box, which LG’s own documentation says must sit lower than the TV’s receiver, with cabinet placement risking signal interference depending on material and thickness. If the box fails, you own a very expensive picture. That’s a lot of conditions attached to the word “invisible”.
What SA buyers should actually weigh
Gamers have the sharpest question, and it’s unresolved. In my own testing of Samsung’s earlier wireless sets, input lag climbed into the mid-20s of milliseconds at 1080p120 and crept toward 40ms at 4K60. Early W6 chatter claims around 13ms at 60Hz, but nothing independent has reproduced that figure yet. Until proper measurements land, treat the gaming story as open.
The enthusiast crowd I follow cares about something else entirely. Their view is that flagships are already bright enough, and what they want is boring reliability: no audio dropouts, no near-black posterisation, no firmware drama. The 2,850-nit brightness figure circulating online is user guesswork, not an LG spec. If the W6 ships with the shadow-detail quirks of recent generations, no amount of thinness will save it.
Then there’s the angle nobody locally is writing about: DStv. LG SA’s own sales head framed the launch around South African lounges having spent years trying to hide the technology, which implicitly sells the Zero Connect Box as the answer to decoder clutter. Except your Explora, PS5 and Apple TV now plug into a box that must sit below the panel, semi-exposed, powered around the clock. During load-shedding that’s a second always-on device feeding your inverter, and every watt counts when you’re sizing a trolley setup.
Money is the bigger problem. LG America priced the W6 at $5,499.99 for the 77-inch and $7,499.99 for the 83-inch, then knocked $700 off within four months of pre-orders opening, with that promo running right now through August 30. We’re the last stop in the rollout after the US in April and Australia in July, which means paying peak launch pricing for a product already discounting elsewhere. At any plausible exchange rate, this is a six-figure rand purchase before duties and margin.
There’s a cheaper sibling sitting on shelves already. The G6 uses the same generation of picture technology, costs meaningfully less, and the enthusiast consensus is blunt: the W6 is a G6 in a thinner body at a higher price. Add the quiet caveat in the SA launch copy that Google Gemini integration is subject to local availability, and you could pay a premium for a set that ships feature-incomplete next to American units. We flagged similar questions when Xiaomi’s QD Mini LED arrived, and the pattern repeats.
None of this makes the W6 a bad television. Independent reviewers haven’t published full verdicts yet, so there’s still no solid data on real HDR brightness, thermals, burn-in behaviour, or what a replacement Zero Connect Box costs. LG’s own announcement leans on CES awards and certifications, and those tell you a prototype impressed judges in Las Vegas, not that a production unit survives a Joburg summer.
So here’s my closing thought. The W6 is the most beautiful television LG has ever built and a genuine engineering flex, the kind of thing that seemed impossible back when the company showed us its rollable transparent OLED. I love that it exists. I just wouldn’t be first in the queue. Wait for the rand price, wait for the reviews, measure your wall, and count your watts. The wallpaper will still be there in six months, probably cheaper.
