Future of TV: LG’s 65-inch 4K rollable OLED screen is here , II Samsung's Micro LED TV First Impressions: 146 Inches Of Magnificent Weirdness

Photo: John Archer

Aside from LG’s crazily stunning ‘OLED Canyon’, the biggest smack-you-round-the-face televisual spectacle of the 2018 CES comes courtesy of Samsung’s ‘The Wall’.
Not content with stopping you in your tracks with its 146-inch screen, this monstrous concoction also dazzles your eyes with unfeasible amounts of whole-screen brightness; blazingly rich colors that make every other screen on Samsung’s stand look drab by comparison; and even the sort of black levels you’d only normally expect to find on an OLED TV.
What’s perhaps most remarkable of all about Samsung’s TV monolith, though, is the way it’s been achieved.

The Wall is both an amazing innovation and a bit of a frustration.

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For starters, it is made using Micro LED technology. This is the name Samsung is (currently, anyway) giving to that Holy Grail of TV technology, self-emissive LCD. In other words, it’s made using 3840x2160 liquid crystals that all generate their own light and color. No longer does the light come from external backlighting that has to be shared across multiple pixels (often tens of thousands at a time), or even across all the pixels at once.

 

This means that Samsung’s ‘Wall’ is able to place incredibly bright pixels right alongside basically black ones without any light ‘bleed’ between the two. OLED technology can already do that, of course, but the extra thrill with The Wall is seeing this talent joined with the massive amounts of brightness LCD pixels can push out that current OLED pixels cannot.
The other remarkable thing about The Wall is that it’s not actually a single megalithic screen. Instead, it has been put together from rows and rows of separate pixel blocks in a modular design that Samsung claims can be used to deliver screens of potentially pretty much any size - be they smaller or (gulp) bigger than 146 inches. In fact, there was at least a little vague talk of attempting to bring a 75-inch ‘modular’ Micro LED TV to market before the end of the year.

 

Personally, though, I think that even if such a product really could be made ready to go commercial in the next 12 months, it will be much more likely to find a home in the digital signage world than anyone’s living room. Partly because I’d imagine the cost of buying such a screen would be exorbitant, and partly because no matter how much Samsung tried to hide them, ‘The Wall’ has a couple of obvious picture flaws that would likely drive homeowners mad.

Photo: John Archer

One of Samsung's demo sequences makes The Wall look like... a wall.

One of them, predictably, is seaming. Although Samsung has in truth done a pretty grand job of minimizing the seams where the Micro LED blocks join together to form the monster 146-inch whole, they are still visible. Or at least that’s the case in dark picture areas; somehow the sheer brightness of light areas of the picture manages to hide the seams away.
The other issue is the screen’s uneven finish. If you look at dark parts of the picture you can clearly see reflections from the show floor’s ambient light bouncing off different modules at slightly different angles. This, together with the seams, makes you feel as if you’re watching dark scenes through some sort of mesh.
It’s perhaps worth adding, too, that if you get pretty close to the screen you become very aware of its pixel structure. What we’ve got here, after all, is a 146-inch screen only being driven by the same ‘4K’ number of pixels now found in TVs as small as 40 inches. From a reasonably sensible viewing distance, though, you don’t really feel aware of either the size of the pixels or the gaps between them.

Photo: John Archer

The Wall being unveiled at Samsung's pre-CES event.

Aside from the issues created by the modular, jigsaw-puzzle approach to creating the screen, the Wall’s picture is pretty much magnificent. Samsung wouldn’t discuss absolute brightness levels, but demo footage such as a white-bricked wall with a fire below it or flowers against a whitish backdrop all looked incredibly dazzling and intense, even against the bright lights of the show floor.
Colors are punchy in the extreme too, yet the lighting precision afforded by each pixel having its own light source means there’s also a startling amount of tonal subtlety on offer, despite all the aggressiveness.
The picture is exceptionally sharp too for such a monster screen, even though I would say that ideally, it could have done with a native 8K pixel count to really blow your mind.
Perhaps most importantly of all, as you’d hope, there wasn’t so much as a hint of light bleed between the image’s brightest and darkest pixels, enabling the image to achieve an almost unbelievable contrast range. No matter what angle you viewed it from.
For all its undoubted immediate majesty, drama and revolutionary technical accomplishments, however, the more I think about The Wall, the more it ultimately feels like a bit of a letdown. Not because it doesn’t showcase what Micro LED technology might be capable of; it does. My problems with it lie in how unrealistic it feels like a true TV technology right now.

Photo: John Archer

Black levels, brightness and colors look incredible on Samsung's Micro LED debutante.

The modular approach actually feels less like a genius vision of the future of TV than a temporary, impractical and ultimately quite a preliminary way of approaching self-emissive LCD technology while they try to figure out how to make Micro LED screens work on a much more TV-like basis.
In other words, while I’d love to be proven wrong by 2019’s Samsung CES offering, once the initial awe of seeing The Wall has worn off, the feeling I get from it is that we might still be a lot further away from being able to buy a simple, non-modular, single-screen 65-inch self-emissive LED TV than AV fans would like to think we are.
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Future of TV: LG’s 65-inch 4K rollable OLED screen is here , II Samsung's Micro LED TV First Impressions: 146 Inches Of Magnificent Weirdness