Say What?
In the early days of TV there was one kind, a black and white CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) TV like the one in Figure 3, That big thing that takes up most of the space is an electron gun that shoots electrons at a phosphor coated screen, with an electron causing the phosphor to glow white and no electron keeping it black. Eventually the screen was coated with red, green and blue phosphor dots and the electron gun could then create color, giving consumers the choice of black and white or color TVs, still a relatively simple choice.
In the mid-1980’s the LCD TV became a new challenger for consumer dollars and within a few years CRT TVs were history and flat screen TVs were the only choice. Over time there were a few contenders, like plasma, but they were a bit hard to manage and were quite expensive until 2007 when Sony (SNE) released the first OLED TV and an alternative to LCD TVs became a reality.
Since then consumers have faced one new technology after another, most of which are variations on LCD technology. Do you want an LCD TV with an edge-lit backlight or a direct-lit backlight? Do you want an LCD TV with a quantum dot enhancer? Do you want an LCD TV with a mini-LED backlight and a quantum dot film? Do you want a micro-LED TV? Do you want a WOLED TV or do you want a Quantum dot/OLED TV? With that barrage of TV technologies it is amazing that consumers are able to make any decision about what to buy, but the choices continue to grow, and this week Samsung added another choice for consumers that will serve to confuse them even more, the Micro RGB TV.
This technology, although it sounds like the micro-LED sets that contain millions of self-emitting LEDs, its not. It is an LCD TV that uses a combination of red, green, and blue LEDs for a backlight that shine through liquid crystal and a traditional color filter. The thought process for this technology is that instead of a white light backlight that becomes color when it passes through a color filter, by using controllable red, green, and blue LEDs as an LCD backlight, the color will be more pure, even after passing through a color filter.
A color filter is a film with millions of colored dots, a red, green, and blue one for each TV pixel. When white light hits the red dots in the color filter it removes the blue and green light, when white light hits the green dots in the color filter, it removes the red and blue light, and when white light hits the blue dots in the color filter, it removes the red and green light. At each point 2/3 of the light is being filtered out so the result is much of the ‘brightness’ of the display is lost. If instead of white light hitting the color filter the light is already separated into the three color components, the color filter will have much less to filter and the output will be brighter and of a purer color, something LCD needs when competing with OLED and other display modalities.
This is a great idea and solves one of the long-standing problems that plagues LCD technology, but it comes at a price. LCD TV backlights (usually blue LEDs with a phosphor that turns them white) are placed in rows (white strips). They can be turned on or off to illuminate the TV pixels but with 4K TVs having 8.294 million pixels LCD TV backlights are not precise and the light can leak into dark parts of the image and cause blacks to appear gray. Adding more LEDs helps and generic LCD TVs can have hundreds of LEDs but with each additional LED control becomes more complex and the cost increases. Mini-LED backlights take backlight LEDs to another level with thousands of LEDs and much finer control, but the color issue mentioned above is still a problem. Now instead of thousands of white LEDs that need to be controlled, in the new Samsung RGB LCD technology each white LED backlight is replaced with one red, one, green, and one blue LED, each of which has to be controlled separately, multiplying the complexity by 3x!
Obviously it is easier to stick thousands of RGB LEDs in a big box, so Samsung has decided to initiate this product with a 115” model. That said, all of that complexity comes at a price, $32,500. But if you compare it to Samsung’s 115” micro-LED TV, which uses millions of tiny self-emitting RGB LEDs, which sells for over $72,000, it’s a bargain. It has been said that Samsung has been developing the technology to provide a ‘lower-cost’ alternative for those that find the micro-LED TV a bit too expensive.
TV Set brands seem to be obsessed with making sure that they have a product for every possible consumer, from the 80 year-old grandmother switching from a 23” CRT for the first time to a sophisticated 32 year-old who is focused on studio-like color quality. But when we speak with consumers in Best Buy (BBY) and Wal-Mart (WMT), 99% say they want something simple that ‘looks good’ and doesn’t cost a lot. They have no idea what the difference between an edge-lit and direct lit backlight is, or do they know that the color saturation is higher in OLED sets than it is in LCD sets. What they care about is price against ‘visual’ quality, and not getting ripped off by some smooth talking salesperson. You might miss the few TV set buyers who are willing to spend $32,500 to have the latest technology, but that R&D money could have gone to improving what most people buy, or (!) lowering the price of generic sets. We don’t need to pair down to one or two choices but making the choice easy for customers sells more devices…
In the mid-1980’s the LCD TV became a new challenger for consumer dollars and within a few years CRT TVs were history and flat screen TVs were the only choice. Over time there were a few contenders, like plasma, but they were a bit hard to manage and were quite expensive until 2007 when Sony (SNE) released the first OLED TV and an alternative to LCD TVs became a reality.
Since then consumers have faced one new technology after another, most of which are variations on LCD technology. Do you want an LCD TV with an edge-lit backlight or a direct-lit backlight? Do you want an LCD TV with a quantum dot enhancer? Do you want an LCD TV with a mini-LED backlight and a quantum dot film? Do you want a micro-LED TV? Do you want a WOLED TV or do you want a Quantum dot/OLED TV? With that barrage of TV technologies it is amazing that consumers are able to make any decision about what to buy, but the choices continue to grow, and this week Samsung added another choice for consumers that will serve to confuse them even more, the Micro RGB TV.
This technology, although it sounds like the micro-LED sets that contain millions of self-emitting LEDs, its not. It is an LCD TV that uses a combination of red, green, and blue LEDs for a backlight that shine through liquid crystal and a traditional color filter. The thought process for this technology is that instead of a white light backlight that becomes color when it passes through a color filter, by using controllable red, green, and blue LEDs as an LCD backlight, the color will be more pure, even after passing through a color filter.
A color filter is a film with millions of colored dots, a red, green, and blue one for each TV pixel. When white light hits the red dots in the color filter it removes the blue and green light, when white light hits the green dots in the color filter, it removes the red and blue light, and when white light hits the blue dots in the color filter, it removes the red and green light. At each point 2/3 of the light is being filtered out so the result is much of the ‘brightness’ of the display is lost. If instead of white light hitting the color filter the light is already separated into the three color components, the color filter will have much less to filter and the output will be brighter and of a purer color, something LCD needs when competing with OLED and other display modalities.
This is a great idea and solves one of the long-standing problems that plagues LCD technology, but it comes at a price. LCD TV backlights (usually blue LEDs with a phosphor that turns them white) are placed in rows (white strips). They can be turned on or off to illuminate the TV pixels but with 4K TVs having 8.294 million pixels LCD TV backlights are not precise and the light can leak into dark parts of the image and cause blacks to appear gray. Adding more LEDs helps and generic LCD TVs can have hundreds of LEDs but with each additional LED control becomes more complex and the cost increases. Mini-LED backlights take backlight LEDs to another level with thousands of LEDs and much finer control, but the color issue mentioned above is still a problem. Now instead of thousands of white LEDs that need to be controlled, in the new Samsung RGB LCD technology each white LED backlight is replaced with one red, one, green, and one blue LED, each of which has to be controlled separately, multiplying the complexity by 3x!
Obviously it is easier to stick thousands of RGB LEDs in a big box, so Samsung has decided to initiate this product with a 115” model. That said, all of that complexity comes at a price, $32,500. But if you compare it to Samsung’s 115” micro-LED TV, which uses millions of tiny self-emitting RGB LEDs, which sells for over $72,000, it’s a bargain. It has been said that Samsung has been developing the technology to provide a ‘lower-cost’ alternative for those that find the micro-LED TV a bit too expensive.
TV Set brands seem to be obsessed with making sure that they have a product for every possible consumer, from the 80 year-old grandmother switching from a 23” CRT for the first time to a sophisticated 32 year-old who is focused on studio-like color quality. But when we speak with consumers in Best Buy (BBY) and Wal-Mart (WMT), 99% say they want something simple that ‘looks good’ and doesn’t cost a lot. They have no idea what the difference between an edge-lit and direct lit backlight is, or do they know that the color saturation is higher in OLED sets than it is in LCD sets. What they care about is price against ‘visual’ quality, and not getting ripped off by some smooth talking salesperson. You might miss the few TV set buyers who are willing to spend $32,500 to have the latest technology, but that R&D money could have gone to improving what most people buy, or (!) lowering the price of generic sets. We don’t need to pair down to one or two choices but making the choice easy for customers sells more devices…
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