If you comb the Internet looking for HDTV news, you may have seen headlines trumpeting a breakthrough announcement along the lines of “LG plans 55″ 3D OLED TV for 2012.” Wow — pretty exciting, huh? Ah, but if only it were true. Sadly, some people who publish on the Web either miss some of the details of a story or don’t understand the technology fully. This is an interesting story, to be sure, but it’s not the one that the headline would indicate.

What appears to be true is that LG is looking to build a 55″ LCD HDTV that uses an OLED backlight. This is quite a different matter than building a 55″ OLED HDTV. Many companies are working hard at bringing OLED lighting devices to market; they are incredibly thin and extremely efficient. As a result, they make an excellent candidate to replace the LED or fluorescent backlight for an LCD HDTV. Apparently, LG has this working in a pre-production mode, and expects to have the design in production by the end of this year.

So this won’t be an “OLED TV” any more than an LCD panel with an LED backlight is an “LED TV,” but the bottom line is that flat panel HDTVs could be about to get a whole lot thinner.