Just when you thought you were sorted with one of the best OLED TVs, along comes a whole new technology to make you lust after an upgrade. Well, maybe don't worry just yet, because Samsung's first TV set using its new microLED screen tech is a 110-inch behemoth.
Look ahead though and this will only be the beginning for microLED.
MicroLED makes the most of self-emissive LED technology, giving each pixel its own micrometer-sized LED. This means incredibly vibrant colours and and exceptional 4K imagery as each tiny LED does its own thing.
Where other LED displays use a backlight, microLED is fully self-illuminating, which means colours can be seen exactly as they were intended, and the screen will apparently happily replicate the wide colour gamuts that high-end DSLR cameras capture.
Self-emissive pixels are, of course, the exact party trick that makes OLED screens so good. But microLED is seen as the successor to OLED because it should offer more reliability, brighter screens, no burn-in problems, and panels could be even thinner.
We'd previously seen the technology used in what Samsung called "The Wall" which was a series of modular panels that could be professionally installed. These could then be extended upon to make even bigger screens without losing any resolution.
This 110-inch screen though is the first time we've seen microLED tech in TV form with all 8 million pixels streamlined into an out-of-the-box solution.
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Samsung has said that bringing this kind of technology into the consumer space previously just wasn't possible, but it has developed a new kind of surface mount tech to bring the bezel-free screens into homes.
Tellingly too, it has also said that these same innovations will allow the firm to produce smaller microLED panels in future. We might not even have a price for this screen yet but Samsung is clearly looking at this taking on OLED in the next couple of years.
And, if you're the kind of person who wants to watch TV while you game, Samsung's Multi View feature means you can watch up to four sources of content on up to 55-inch split screens on the 110-inch panel. Given the 99.99% screen-to-body ratio, there's plenty of room on screen. We just can't guarantee how much room there will need to be in your brain to consume all that stuff at once.
Plus, you're not going to have to plug in a soundbar. Samsung has built in its own Majestic Sound System to bring 5.1 audio into your living room without the need for any additional speakers. The Object Tracking Sound Pro system even identifies the action on screen to deliver perfect positional audio.
If all that sounds tantalising, the 110-inch MicroLED will be released in the first quarter of next year and hopefully we'll get a price at CES 2021 in early Jan.
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