You can pick the exact size and shape of this new shapeshifting TV from Samsung.
Samsung has previewed a 75-inch version of its MicroLED TV at CES 2019 – introduced last year as The Wall.
It’s notable not because it’s so big, but because it’s so small: MicroLED is made up of millions of inorganic red, green and blue microscopic LED chips that emit their own bright light to produce brilliant colours on screen – and this is the first time Samsung has manage to make them small enough to create a TV that would fit in your living room.
The benefit of MicroLED is that the picture should be better than OLED, and doesn't have any of the drawbacks of using an organic compound. That means Samsung’s TV should be able to deliver perfect blacks, higher contrast and a very wide HDR colour palette – all the while giving the TV a longer lifespan than OLED too.
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But because MicroLED is modular, at some point in the near future Samsung says we’ll be able to order custom MicroLED TVs at any size or aspect ratio.
Lots of #FirstLook2019 news: The 75-inch MicroLED TV isn’t actually called The Wall, but the new 219-inch version is. Infinite size is actually limited to the size of the MicroLED module - you can’t get a 84.55-inch TV, for example. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/4TYw2B7bvQJanuary 7, 2019
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On show here in Vegas, Samsung’s new 75-inch MicroLED TV is the smallest version so far that's achieved a 4K resolution. At the other end of the scale, the company is also displaying a monstrous 219-inch model, which it says will offer “something above 4K".
Price, of course, remains to be seen. But MicroLED displays are incredibly tricky to produce at scale – if one RGB sub-pixel is bad, it could be game over for the whole display – and we’re likely looking at tens of thousands of dollars, at least.
So is this the next big thing for TV tech? Samsung certainly thinks so. Time will tell…
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Julia is editor-in-chief, retail at Future Ltd, where she works in e-commerce across a number of consumer lifestyle brands. A former editor of design website Creative Bloq, she’s also worked on a variety of print titles, and was part of the team that launched consumer tech website TechRadar. She's been writing about art, design and technology for over 15 years.
