There appears to be something going wrong with LG OLED TVs in South Korea, a new report has shown. Some 60,000 TVs have been recalled due to a defect in their power boards that carries the risk of power overflow and LG is currently investigating how widely spread the issue may be.
The issue was first reported by Yonhap News, who say 18 different OLED TV series produced between February 2016 and September 2019 are possibly affected– including the super popular C7 and B7 Series – but only in South Korea.
In a follow-up to the report with ZDNet, LG says it’s aware of the issue and has offered to replace the power boards, though it doesn’t classify this as a government-mandated recall and rather something the company is doing proactively to prevent issues.
“The overheating issue occurred only in very few models out of the total that used the component, but we will provide free component swaps for all of them for customer safety,” LG said.
Yonhap News says LG has currently fixed 22,000 OLED TVs and so far no cases of the defective power board have been reported outside of South Korea.
Is your LG OLED TV at risk?
The short answer? Probably not.
While all LG OLEDs use the same panels that come from LG Display’s factory in Paju, South Korea, the power boards are likely region-specific to handle the different voltage standards of different countries – i.e. OLED TVs made for Korea likely don’t have the same power board that a TV made for Europe or North America would.
That being said, LG is looking into the possibility of other countries being affected by the issue.
We’ll keep you posted if any new cases are discovered outside of South Korea, but for now you can keep using your OLED as usual while we wait to see how the situation develops.