Samsung's super-thin QD-OLED TV tech sounds incredible

If you thought today's OLED and QD-OLED displays were thin, wait till you see what Samsung's cooking up

Samsung S95B
(Image credit: Samsung)

Samsung's next-gen OLED TV, the Samsung S95B, is an amazing TV and could well be one of the very best OLED TVs of 2022 and one of the best TVs full stop. But while it's a very impressive TV with truly incredible technology inside it, Samsung has even more exciting things in development. And one of the most exciting of those things is a new way of manufacturing Quantum Dot OLED panels that are so thin you could probably cut cheese with them.

More practically, that could transform the way TVs are made, how they look and how we use them. And it'll make them cheaper to make and cheaper to buy too. 

For Samsung, thin is in

I love thin TVs: I've long since abandoned built-in speakers in favour of the best soundbars and the best AV receivers, so as far as I'm concerned the thinner the better. Measuring TV thickness in inches is so 2010: today's thinnest TVs are measured in millimetres, with TVs such as the sadly discontinued LG Wallpaper OLED TV coming in at just 2.5mm thick. As we said in our elegy for that particular model, the Wallpaper TV made it feel like the pictures were happing right there on the wall, so even the daftest TV show felt like you were watching a work of art.

According to reports in Korean media, which in turn have been reported by OLED Info, Samsung is working on really, really thin TV tech. At the moment, its QD-OLED display uses two glass substrates: one for the OLEDs, and one for the quantum dots. The new approach uses inkjets to print the quantum dots directly onto the OLED substrate instead. In the short term that means much thinner QD-OLEDs; in the long term, the reports say, the same tech could lead to flexible or even rollable QD-OLED panels.

Personally I'm not entirely sold on rollable TVs; as impressive as it is to have a TV that disappears when you don't need it, it's not something I particularly want or need. But a TV so thin it barely protrudes from the wall? Count me in.

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Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).