Samsung Electronics is getting ready to announce its first ever consumer MicroLED TV, perhaps as soon as this week, according to reports in South Korea’s media.
The Yonhap news agency and SamMobile both reported this week that Samsung is to debut a new MicroLED TV designed for people's living rooms during a digital webinar it’s set to host this week, adding to its existing “The Wall” TV that was first revealed at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show.
MicroLED is a new display technology that consists of microscopic light emitting diodes of different colors arranged into an array. MicroLED is considered by some to be a superior technology to the OLED and QLED displays that are used in today’s premium televisions. That’s because they can achieve greater brightness without any degradation or burn-in, as well as the same deep blacks seen in OLED.
MicroLED displays are also modular in nature, which means it’s possible to create displays of any size and with any aspect ratio, at up to 16K resolution.
Samsung’s original The Wall was a 146-inch modular display, and the company followed up with a larger 219-inch model at CES 2019, then an 8K resolution 292-inch monster at CES 2020. At the time, Samsung said the displays had potential applications in business and signage, or as luxury installations.
Samsung has also stated its interest in making MicroLED technology commercially available. To that end company demonstrated smaller 75-inch, 88-inch, 93-inch and 110-inch MicroLED displays at CES 2020 that might one day end up as consumer TVs. Samsung said its first 75-inch MicroLED TV would in fact go on sale sometime this year, but manufacturing problems have delayed any announcement.
The Korean media reports say that the long-rumoured TV could be announced soon though. However, they speculate that this consumer-grade MicroLED TV will be made up of millimetre-sized LEDs instead of micrometer scale LEDs in order to address the problems Samsung has had with low production yields.
Samsung Display’s head of visual business Han Jong-hee has previously stated that consumer-grade MicroLED TVs could go on sale by the second half of 2021 in Europe and the U.S., and has said the company is gearing up for large scale manufacturing.
