Skip to main content

We were wrong. Samsung is ready to put OLED on notice with a 75-inch MicroLED TV

Samsung dropped a lot of bombs at its CES preview event, but without question the biggest star of all was its brand-new 75-inch MicroLED TV (aka Micro LED TV in Samsung speak). This is kind of a big deal. Last year, Samsung debuted its 146-inch “The Wall” TV. At the time, we thought there was no way they were going to be able to scale it down to a size most people could fit into their home.

Well, we were wrong.

Samsung put its engineers on the task, they shrunk the size of the little LED chips that make up the panels, and this year there is a 75-inch version. That’s about the size that somebody might actually put in their home.

So what’s so special about MicroLED? It’s an emissive display, kind of like OLED, with individual red, green, and blue pixels. Unlike OLED, they’re not organic, so they don’t suffer from longevity problems or the potential for burn-in. They last a really long time, they get true black and get extremely bright, and can handle a huge swath of color volume. Not only that, the display is borderless, so there’s no bezel to deal with.

The other thing Samsung is talking a lot about here is the modular nature of these displays. It has a massive 219-inch version, as well as a second generation of the 146-inch version that we saw last year. Because each TV is made of multiple individual panels, you can build a display in a number of different shapes and sizes.

So what about the seams between panels? We stood in front of the 219-inch TV, saw the seam, then stepped back, and it was about 6 feet before that seam disappeared. If you look closely at the 75-inch version, you can actually see a seam along the bottom where the lower strip seems a little bit darker than the rest of the panel. But I think, when you sit back from the TV and just watch it instead of analyzing it, it’s not all that obvious.

219-inch Samsung Micro LED TV
219-inch Samsung MicroLED TV Rich Shibley/Digital Trends

More CES 2019 coverage

We do wonder about how the consumer applications for this are going to play out. This is mostly aimed at businesses and the commercial installer crowd, for people who have elaborate installations. Is it going to be a consumer TV? Is it going to be an OLED killer? We’re not convinced yet. There’s still reason to be excited, because when you talk about the black levels, the brightness, and the color volume, it’s a spectacular TV. But there is a reason they’re not letting us too close to it.

There are a few things that we’re going to discover when we do a deep dive, and we’re just going to have to wait a few months for that to happen. But it is exciting to know that this is a product that Samsung intends to bring to market, and it’s a sign of where Samsung is trying to move its TV business.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Caleb Denison
Digital Trends Editor at Large Caleb Denison is a sought-after writer, speaker, and television correspondent with unmatched…
Samsung confirms ultrabright 77-inch QD-OLED panel for CES 2023. Will it be a TV?
Samsung's new 77-inch QD-OLED TV with vibrant picture on screen

Samsung Display has confirmed it will be showing a newly developed 77-inch variant of its QD-OLED panel technology at CES 2023. Whether Samsung Electronics will follow suit with an announcement about a 77-inch QD-OLED TV remains to be seen for now, but I expect to know more within the early days of the show. The new QD-OLED panel has been dubbed "QD-OLED 2023" and the company claims it can exceed 2,000 nits of brightness.

Samsung Display says the impressive new levels of brightness have been achieved through a combination of new panel design -- new "OLED HyperEfficient EL" material which improves the color brightness of each RGB -- and new optimization software dubbed IntelliSense AI.

Read more
Samsung just dropped a massive 98-inch Neo QLED mini-LED TV
Samsung 98-inch QN100B series.

In what can only be characterized as an epic play of one-upmanship, Samsung has just announced a new addition to its 2022 4K TV lineup, and it is massive.

Unveiled in Dallas, Texas at the 2022 CEDIA Expo, the new 98-inch Neo QLED 4K TV uses mini-LED backlight technology and is equipped to be Samsung's highest-performing 4K TV to date. Previously, Samsung's 4K TV lineup was headlined by the QN95B and QN90B. The new 98-inch model uses the same processing and panel technology but has a more powerful backlight system.

Read more
Samsung looks for an ‘Age of Togetherness’ with new Frame, Neo QLED TVs
Samsung Micro LED 2022.

Samsung kicks off CES 2022 doing what Samsung does best -- taking its line of many televisions, already great in their own right, and kicking things up yet another notch. Smarter, brighter, better, easier to use -- all the things that make a TV more than a TV in an era in which we're spending more time in front of the TV than ever.

On the front side of things is a new home screen, "a testament to our vision for the future of TVs." Samsung is paring things down to three main hubs -- a Media Screen, a Gaming Hub, and Ambient Mode. They're mostly self-explanatory. If it's something you're going to watch (via Samsung's built-in apps, anyway), you'll get to it from the Media Screen. The Gaming Hub gets you into your cloud-based gaming services and consoles and works with existing third-party controllers and headsets. And the Ambient Mode makes it easier than ever to have something pleasant on the screen when you're not actively watching or playing something. That includes art, or photos, or even NFTs, because it's 2022 and it's all about non-fungible tokens, apparently.

Read more