TV's last stand.
The future of television is sustainable, even though the interest in TV sets is waning.
It takes balls to stand up on the world stage and put a bullet into a product that your company has become synonymous with. I applaud Samsung for having the guts to follow through on the truth behind the pivot to #MicroLED, but it seems that the South Korean giant wasn't attacking its own product; it was instead sniping at its noisy neighbour...
When LG announced it was ceasing LCD production in its home country at the close of 2020 and pivoting to a massive organic light-emitting diode (OLED) industrial complex in China, it sent a tremor through the display industry. LG Display is by far the leading supplier of high-end TV displays and customers like Sony and Visio were making a strong push into the market on the back of the Korean company's incessant innovation.
Samsung, however, shut operations in one of its S. Korea LCD plants to upgrade production lines for a forthcoming scaling of innovative technology: MicroLED.
Quantum leap
By now the marketing clarion calls of Quantum Dot Technology inside Samsung's QLED displays should have reached your ears. Quantum Dots (QD) are artificial atomic particles that can be engineered to respond to energy wavelengths in a very specific way. In the case of TVs those dots are used to either display red or green when hit with a blast of blue light. It's important that the light is blue because blue LEDs are cheaper to make than white ones - which are usually achieved by putting a phosphorous coating over a blue LED anyway.
LCD displays work with a panel of LEDs (more energy efficient than previous tubes, which sparked the name change to LED) that pass light through a circuit in liquid crystal, and ultimately sends light through a specific set of colour filters. QD removes the need for the phosophorous coating as well as a blue colour filter. This also equals efficiency gains at the LED level because they don't need to shine as brightly to get through the many filters between the light and your eyes.
OLED replaces the liquid crystal and arranges a matrix of organically coloured, individually powered LEDs directly on the control circuit. This removes the need for a backlight and colour filters and saves energy by switching of the individual pixels when not in use (read: displaying black).
Sidebar: MiniLED reduces the size of the backlight LEDs and increases the density which, in turn, allows for more precise control of colour pixel zones.
Nano scale
MicroLED is pretty much the engineers saying "what if we just made the LEDs smaller and coloured them individually?" These micometer LEDs leverage Samsung's semiconductor prowess which now produces transistors at 5nm - it is a key supplier of
microchips for Apple and Qualcomm - and gives the marketing department a new tune to trumpet and drown out its competition.
To be fair, inorganic LEDs don't suffer from the same decay issues as OLED and benefit from decades of production efficiencies that should, in time, bring the costs down from the astronomical highs right now. Samsung is also claiming that it can produce these display panels at a borderless 10-inch size and they can be seamlessly meshed together into a bigger screen in any shape you need.
When this modular idea is added to the newly announced mission to produce technology that lasts longer, it paints a picture of environmental awareness that few electronics companies seem to understand. A new technology shouldn't immediately force an upgrade cycle because that just multiplies the electronic waste problem the world faces right now.
Slimming down the display panels also makes more room to put more computing components in that can deliver better customer experiences.
My read:
While this new technology is fascinating it is still many years away from reaching the mobile level. Samsung currently cannot produce those 10-inch modules at a high-enough resolution to create small UHD displays. A bigger challenge for MicroLED stickiness, however, is the increasing marginalising of the TV set.If you had to choose between a fancy new TV that would replace the perfectly functional unit you already own, or a brand-new smartphone or laptop for the same money; I'm gonna bet you'll get a new phone.
Content providers are also now reducing the cost of mobile-only subscriptions as the tradition of the family gathering around a central screen is eroded by individual content consumption. Kids will much rather watch what they want on their phone than put down the social media portal in favour of family time. Old people buy TVs, basically.
The TV won't fade from existence immediately, but 2021 really does seem like a last-ditch rally for significance for this fading giant of home entertainment. Luckily there was a global pandemic that encouraged people to stay home and look at the television set with renewed admiration for the window to outside world.
Further in Samsung's newly announced product lines is the addition of cameras to the TV which enable breakthrough innovations for accessibility and ecosystem integration.
One of these new powers is AI-powered image recognition. This is great for sign language interpretation, but Samsung couldn't help itself and used it for fitness applications
Please don't rely on AI recommendations to improve your squat form. Everyone moves differently and these machine learning algorithms are trained on generalised movement patterns.
Something you should know about:
Plastic recycling isn't profitable, and the system is currently broken. Here's a great infographic that explains it, or you can watch this video if you prefer moving pictures and soothing narration.
The bottom line is that without China gobbling up the world's plastic waste because the associated healthcare negatives are weighing heavy on the government bottom line, the entire system is in disarray. All is not lost, though. Demand is surging for certain recycled products like cardboard and paper, thanks to increased home consumption.
So now you know why Woolworths is actually moving away from supplying plastic bags that you probably reuse to dispose other waste but will still sell you all the plastic packaging you can think of in the actual products. Hint: it's because plastic bags cost them money and is getting more expensive, whereas the packaging costs suppliers money.
A number that may only interest me:
99 000 000
That's how many batteries Samsung says its new photovoltaic (PV; solar) or USB charged TV remote controls will save over seven years. I imagine that the world's leading TV manufacturer took its annual average TV shipments and multiplied by two - because most remotes take two batteries.
A quote that seemed profound when I said/heard it:
"When you buy technology, the price you pay is for the value you extracted from it at the time. You can't expect to make that back when reselling." - Lindsey Schutters
Context: speaking to someone who is trying to flip old gear and media for a few Rands in January.