Samsung bets on MicroLED and 8K for its premium 2023 TVs
engadget.com
engadget.com
Any engineer designing stuff with high power LED's knows how important thermal design is. The LED's should have had temperature sensing and software feedback to reduce the brightness to stop everything melting.
That could have been implemented by measuring the forward voltage... Or with a dedicated temperature sensor.
But on a $1000 TV, Samsung didn't want to pay the 1 cent per unit plus a day of engineering time that would have taken.
And as a result, the TV's had a high failure rate and they lost me as a customer.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4ddIfgarPg
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_FbhYzmNHQ
Its amazing how they managed to really become the leaders(or near leaders) in a lot of fields while still shipping so much junk.
This sounds like a great opportunity for American firms to come back in and really shine.
When I got a 1920x1200 display in circa 2004 that was pretty beast but I could still see pixels, I knew it could be better in theory even if it was already so much better than what else was on the market.
However when 4K IPS and especially the latest generation of 4K OLEDs came along I realised at my viewing distances (and my degrading eyesight) I'm never going to see another pixel again.
So for me I don't see what 8K is going to do for me. OLED with it's perfect blacks and awesome peak brightness and fast refresh times haven't left me wishing for much other than a GPU that can keep up.
I won't need it until I can't buy anything else. 95% of the content I view on my 4K TV is 1080p. At living room distances, it's fine.
I do think high frequency rate monitors are a gimmick, but I did read somewhere (lost the link) that scientists do think the human ability to see resolution isn't really physically restricted beyond just the limits with one's own eyes. So, don't knock it I guess and claim 640K ought to be enough for anybody just yet.
[0] it is an "in" thing to play "retro games" now, although generally some older games do just look better on a crt over blocky pixellated hdmi converters.
Do you mean refresh rate? If yes, I used to think that but couldn’t be more wrong. Nowadays I have a 144hz monitor and I’m considering even going >240hz.
If you have the gear to push that much fps it’s a night day difference.
Maybe someone with better eyes than me can but I'm never getting younger so my eyes are downhill from here so if I can't see it today I'm not going to see it in the future.
I'm not talking about something subjective like "I don't think it's worth the difference", I'm talking "my eyes literally can't see the difference".
Same. I don't scroll often enough to care. Or rather, I don't try reading and scrolling at the same time.
I feel that the amount of people who care about the jump to 4K (for watching movies / shows) is pretty small.
The amount that care about the jump from 4K to 8k will be a fraction of that.
50" Plasma: 290-430 watts, depending on image; refresh rate is SLOW & obvious; I only run this in the wintertime, for "space heating"
55" OLED: 90 watts, twice as bright; colors are INCREDIBLE, almost as good as my ICR10 monitor that costs 3x per pixel;
The 55" OLED has the same pixel density as a 30" Cinema Display, but the pixels are brighter and take up more of the area (i.e. there isn't as much "support network" / black) and is obviously 4K.
I'm really looking forward to a hopefully affordable 6k 32" monitor from Dell this year!
Even for THX recommendation for 40 degree FOV, 4K is above that threshold. And most people would prefer 30 FOV. There are cases where people prefer 50 FOV, then 4K would be at its limit. But even if we were to include 20/10 vision, 50 FOV viewing usage, 5K or 6K would still be enough with room to spare.
We really should have pushed for 6K. 5K would likely get pushed back from marketing because 1K increase isn't enough. While 6K has double the pixel of 4K. ( Great for marketing ). Enough to satisfy even the most demanding, high end users.
I'm on a 4K 27" monitor right now and I can see no edges or pixelation. I'm not really sure what higher resolution would do.
Honestly for the work I'm doing I'd struggle to justify a move to OLED (this is IPS), but at least there'd be a reason. I don't get what the point of ever higher resolutions is when I can't tell the difference.
Sure, someone will say "you can't see the difference but I can", but at that resolution I'm very skeptical.
I was able to snag a 8k 55" tv for USD ~1000 a couple of years ago and it's absolutely glorious as a monitor. Basically it functions as 4 4k monitors in one unified canvas.
When I sit down to work, most of my field of view is screen real-estate. I can have several pages of code vertically surrounded by handfuls of terminal windows and reference material, and it's all perfectly crisp since it's 8K on only 55".
I think we are basically brainwashed when it comes to monitors. Monitors grow a few pixels in resolution and a few inches in size every decade or so, and I've heard the argument repeated - "I got a 21" (22", 24", 27") screen, it's nice but that's as big as I want to go". Somehow when a new few inches larger becomes the norm in the market, everyone thinks that's OK too.
I think most knowledge workers would get hooked on 55" within a few hours of using it. I know I was.
Unfortunately this TV seems to have been a bit of an anomaly. The market today is filled with worse products costing more money. :(
LG was able to make this and ship it everywhere in the world for sub-1000 usd years ago. The technology exists and is not expensive, it just needs to be set free!
I could have bought a 4k TV for $300 but it would be full of surveillance hardware, and I hate that. This TV doesn't even have a network connection, it's just a big monitor. Works great!
8k seems amusing, but definitely seems like a point of diminishing returns.
About those new TVs. You always have a choice to not connect your smart TV with the internet and connect something you trust more with internet access to watch what you want to watch. At least that is what we do at our home. I never see or even update the software on the TV itself. What I like about the new 4K OLED TV we have is not the 4K but the HDR, deep blacks and the colors. It was a definite very big upgrade over our old 2010 HD TV.
The experience of acquiring content is terrible - I have to browse many various storefronts which only have subsets of the content I might want and then pay money to "buy" media knowing full well it's ephemeral and will eventually get lost when the company shuts down, discontinues their service or closes my account for an alleged violation of ToS.
Back in the day I used to pirate and watch tons of stuff as a result, but ironically despite my disposable income rising to a level where I don't need to pirate I pretty much gave up on watching movies at home.
During the HTPC era (with programs like XBMC, Kodi, and later Plex), it was possible to download the top 100 movies automatically and watch them on your TV. Some major media companies noticed this and released their own streaming platforms, which improved the user experience.
Now, all of that has changed. Most major media companies have their own stores, and the content is fragmented. You have to think and search before you can play anything because you don't know who owns the rights to a particular piece of content (this also varies depending on your location). Some content can even disappear from a platform. The user experience is broken again.
Today, piracy is not about access to content, but about the user experience. Having one store is better than many.
on an lg oled display i instantly notice when something is 1080p vs 4k.
i suggest watching an old movie in 4k. for example die hard in 4k is absolutely incredible compared with the DVD release.
The highest resolution supported by standards compliant DVD is 720x480 at 30hz, or 720x576 for 25hz/PAL.
That being said, when I walk into a TV store, I'm impressed by the quality of the demo videos. What I'd like to see though, is how these new TV compare to my old one for the content I watch (basically, YouTube videos, and occasionally streaming some movie).
One thing that I found to be a huge improvement though is Dolby Vision.
I've been working on an FPGA project that involves 1080p into a 4K monitor over HDMI and it looks very sharp to me, even on high contrast edges with a pretty critical eye.
from my experience 4K and 1080p costs the same. not only that, but i haven't really seen popular youtube uploads or movie streams in 1080p for a good chunk of years now.
my mistake was thinking about renting titles on prime and rakuten, where i get 4k(uhd) and 1080p at the same price.
I did not get headache or anything, just that within 5-10 mins my eyes would feel strain and discomfort, which vanished as soon as I moved to my older 15" MBP.
EDIT: As several people noted, I made a mistake, got confused between mini LED and microLED.
embarrassed
Mini LED uses an array of white LEDs to provide somewhat-localized dimming / illumination. You can get close to true blacks with this, but you might notice a halo around areas since the mini LED array resolution is lower than that of the RGB pixels.
And, maybe more important, let's not forget the glare effect in our eyes [0] that tends to mask smaller halos.
A couple papers for example, [1] describes one of the better classical algorithms, and [2] is about a modern NN-based approach.
[0] https://resources.mpi-inf.mpg.de/hdr/TemporalGlare/
[1] (2015, pdf) https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01362368/file/IVMSP2016...
[2] (2020) https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.08352v1
How can that black be as black as in the neighboring area where the backlight is off?
Long story short, I found a solution that removed all my issues;
- Use the accessibility «contrast» feature set to level 2
- Use an app[0] that applies a gamme filter to adjust the white level down to account for the contrast increase
- (optional) use an srgb color profile that disables temporal dithering of colors
This reduces you max brightness level to the same amount as the old 15 inch (I don’t need the extra brightness) but allowes you to keep the backlight at max output, minimizing the pvm strobing effect[0] that some people seem to be sensitive to.
[0] https://michelf.ca/projects/gamma-control/
[1] https://osxdaily.com/2021/05/14/workaround-pwm-oled-iphone-i...
BTW, I don't run into any issues with the 13" M1 AIR also. So, decided that it wasn't worth it for me to have to fiddle around with setting on a rather expensive piece of hardware and decided to return it and wait in case Apple launches a 15" MB Air with a regular (as in not mini LED) screen.
In they don't, I'll give the 16" MBP another shot and might try your solution.
MicroLED (uLED) is still an exotic technology, it’s in principle similar to OLED, but with inorganic LEDs. It has better color rendering and less burn in problems, but is difficult to manufacture for now.
Basically, display technology names are deceptive, similar names may mean completely different things.
I just can't imagine how the video editing industry could adopt 8k realistically without any significant technological breakthroughs.
I used to be able to buy a Samsung LCD and it was good, no bleeding, good colors, good for work monitor.
Now that it's a race for price I don't know if the monitor I am looking at is complete garbage or not because they are all advertised the same with bullshit words. I have to go down into the detailed specs and watch countless reviews because many are just paid shils. I don't need a high speed gaming monitor, just something that doesn't bleed left/right and has a good viewing angle.
My hope with OLED and micro led that monitors will generally all look good even the bottom of the barrel and I won't be fisted with my purchase when I turn it on for the first time.
There's recent IEEE research which shows that 8K is useless, there's also a stack of other well founded research which shows that viewer engagement on video content tops out at 1080p60+HDR (which is still classified as 'UHD' in some definitions of UHD).
8K is just marketing and trying to sell people things they don't need.
They are planning to ban the least energy efficient products (not only TVs), which means that companies have to produce more energy efficient products.
Efficiency is typically understood to be a the ratio of the useful work performed to the total energy expended.
For something like a light bulb, you can calculate a theoretical maximum amount of light that could be produced per Watt of power (assuming for the sake of argument a single wavelength of light) and then compare the amount of light being produced to the number of Watts being used. The ratio is the efficiency.
But as the 'output' of the TV is 'entertainment', and there's no ISO unit of entertainment, it's hard to measure what the output is. If one produces a `better` picture quality, but uses an extra 100 Watts of power, you can easily measure and compare the extra power used, but not the picture quality. If a TV produces a brighter picture for the same power, is that a good or a bad thing with respect to efficiency? Surely it must be one or the other?
As you can't measure the output in a meaningful way, these limits end up being arbitrary lines in the sand with respect to energy usage.
I must concede it might end up influencing manufacturers to make more energy efficient products to `get the grade`, but it still rankles to call these grades measures of efficiency.
sidenote:
It's slightly amusing that the limits apply to the `default` mode provided on a TV, I wonder whether you'll start seeing TVs ship with very dark picture 'defaults' that end users then have to manually switch from.
Yes, a TV that is bigger and/or brighter would still use more energy, but there are reasonable limits on the practical visible light output of home TVs anyway.
And yes, it would also depend on the brightness and other characteristics of the specific video content. A video with less visible light output is obvious not inherently “less entertaining” than a video with more visible light output. But benchmarks could use some reasonable large “corpus” of video content.
But imagine you have two TVs, identical sizes. A 4K TV that uses 900W and a 8K TV that uses 905W.
Which is more efficient?
You have two TVs, one only supports stereo sound that uses 800W and one that supports Dolby Surround, Atmos etc. that uses 801W. (for the sake of argument, we're talking about passthrough to an external audio device with its own power rating)
Which is more efficient?
It's hard to create non-subjective measurements/comparisons between TV outputs that can be compared as they are potentially multi-dimensional comparisons.
Assuming the same amount of visible light output, the 900W one is more efficient. What’s controversial about that? It’s no different than how a car might have a more appealing appearance but that causes it to be less fuel efficient. The efficiency calculation is not complicated by the fact that sometimes people value things other than efficiency.
The 'useful' part of a TV is the moving pictures, and one could argue that a 'quantitatively' better picture should have some bearing on an efficiency metric. I would argue that a TV that can only show 1 frame a second for the same energy that another TV can show 60 should be considered less efficient.
The comparison with a car is an interesting one.
From that perspective, we would hold all things equal, and then compare the easy to measure metric. i.e. Showing 480p content at 24 frames per second, stereo only, non-HDR content.
This might then be similar to the way we measure fuel efficiency for given speed + driving conditions, AC off etc.
Well, no, it’s not a TV. I never defined the term “TV,” I merely defined “efficiency” for a TV. We could quibble on some edge cases (is a digital photo frame a TV?) and I’m sure any environment regulations would need to go into excruciating detail, but that doesn’t mean we can’t immediately dismiss the notion that a light bulb is a TV.
> I would argue that a TV that can only show 1 frame a second for the same energy that another TV can show 60 should be considered less efficient.
You seem to be stuck in the mindset that efficiency is the only thing that matters, as if “efficient” simply means “good.” But no, efficiency is just one attribute. A hypothetical TV that clearly can’t function as a TV for the vast majority of people doesn’t illustrate a problem with my straightforward notion of efficiency.
If there were strict environmental regulations for this stuff, of course they would need to define some classes of devices and define some reasonable efficiency requirements based on the capabilities of each class of device.
> From that perspective, we would hold all things equal, and then compare the easy to measure metric. i.e. Showing 480p content at 24 frames per second, stereo only, non-HDR content.
That could be useful information to have, for consumers and perhaps for regulators. I mentioned that benchmarks would probably need to use some large corpus of content. But efficiency would still be defined as I proposed, and it’s very possible and not at all problematic for a less capable TV to be more efficient (just like it’s possible and not problematic for a faster car to be less fuel efficient).
It's linked from the article in GP's post. https://commission.europa.eu/energy-climate-change-environme...
But getting Samsung to deliver a monitor that is in the right PPI (150+) and in the right dimensions is going to be challenge.
For movies and couch viewing (even at 150"), I've hit my eyeball needs (as far as resolution is concerned). I am however all about buying 8k if the panel/software offers PiP for 4 separate quadrants and in effect give me 4 seamless 4k screens. Would be awesome for productivity.
The other problem with these extreme hi-res displays is the amount of data or bandwidth necessary to make use of them. Storage sizes aren't doubling every year like they used to.
Is this much brightness even needed for a TV?
For example, clouds could be just white (low max brightness) vs. clouds could have details (high peak brightness). And this is especially important in how the HDR movie is graded (and which peak brightness it is targetting).
Vincent (HDTVTest) made a good video on the subject.
This is not about being able to see the image with good enough contrast, it is about creating an image that is life like.
Also, you're way off on your units or something. Specifically built, very expensive digital signage lcd displays only go up to a max of 6000 nits, which is crazy high and results in a display that draws 20 amps at 220v. Source below, and I've designed them. A 65" display at 30k nits would draw more than a thousand amps at 220v, it just isn't true. 6k nits is the practical limit of a display like this. Even jumbotrons don't go to 30k nits.
https://ultravisionledsolutions.com/blogs/news/what-are-nits...
The power usage of signage is relative to its power (light) output. The energy to create those photons has to come from somewhere.
I said that's the brightness under full sunlight; that's the ambient light which a readable display needs to compete with.
The display doesn't need to compete with the brightness of the sun u less you want a display as bright as the sun, which is crazy. You just want to be able to read it in daylight, not light the world.