Only- Electronics

Skinny LCDs and plasmas be hanged, the new watchword where televisual svelteness is concerned is OLED, and they don't come much slimmer than Sony's XEL-1 OLED TV. Unfortunately, they do mostly come with a far longer lifespan, if new reports are to be believed.

An independent investigation by Displaysearch has thrown doubt on the XEL-1 screen's claimed 30,000-hour lifespan.

The company ran two XEL-1s alongside each other for 1,000 hours (probably watching re-runs of Dallas we imagine) before measuring the change in brightness emitted, with the final tally indicating it would take around 17,000 hours before the screen loses half of its brightness.

That 17,000 hours, or 5.8 years at eight hours viewing a day, may not sound bad to the lesser-informed (it's a hell of a lot of Mighty Boosh at any rate), but it's still almost half Sony's claimed 30,000-hour expectancy.

Sony is maintaining its own figures are correct and backed up by years of testing, but the big question is, does it matter? Chances are few of us are going to splash out $2,500 for an 11-inch TV no matter how thin it is. We'll wait for the bigger, badder models that'll last longer than it'll take to repay the loan we used to buy them thanks.