Home Theater Geeks 486 Transcript

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00:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
In this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I talk about my visit to Display Week 2025. So stay tuned.

00:10 - Leo (Announcement)
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT.

00:29 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Hey there, scott Wilkinson. Here, the home theater geek. In this episode I talk about my visit to the Display Week 2025 convention hosted by the Society for Information Display. Every year, the greatest video technologists assemble for Display Week and it's a real geek fest for those of us who are into display technology, and I mean it gets deep. There are papers and there's a display floor, a show floor, where all the manufacturers show their latest technologies, and there were some really cool ones there this year.

01:10
I'm going to start with a technology called RGB LED, which I talked about just a couple episodes ago in episode 484. This is a technology in which, instead of a blue backlight or a white backlight in an LCD TV, the LEDs in the backlight are actually full red, green and blue LEDs in many LEDs primarily and they form a lower resolution, full color image of what's on the screen. That light then passes through the LCD layer, which forms a much higher resolution image of the same thing. So there were a couple of them at display week that I actually got to see. First, one that I'm going to show you is from TCL's research and development arm, called TCL CSOT or CSOT, and they showed this RGB LED backlit LCD TV, which was 98 inches, 16 by 9, 3840 by 2160, normal UHD resolution. They claimed it had 95% of the BT 2020 color gamut, which is very, very big. They also claimed it had 178 degree viewing angle, which you know. I took this picture off angle and it does look really, really good, so they're doing something to improve the viewing angle of LCD TVs.

02:53
Also, there was another company there that doesn't have a consumer arm. They're just an OEM, an original equipment manufacturer, that supply panels to other companies, a Chinese company called BOE, and they were showing something really interesting which they called field sequential RGB, and so it's RGB LED. It has RGB red, green and blue mini LEDs in the backlight, but they're flashed sequentially, so only the reds fire first and then only the greens and then only the blues. They're separated in time. This allows even higher brightness and lower power consumption. Even more interesting, no color filters are required. You don't need color filters if the red, green and blue are being flashed separately, which also means you could have three times the number of pixels on the screen, or a lot more brightness. Take your pick Now the LCDs, the shutters that actually turn on and off, or have a dimmer on them that allow more or less light through each one, they need to be super fast, faster than normal.

04:13
So that's one thing to think about. In these 85 inches UHD resolution, 2,000 nits of peak brightness with a contrast ratio of 8,000 to 1, which is okay. It's not as good as OLED, but and they said they claim 92% of the BT 2020 color gamut the field rate that is, the rate at which the red, green and blue LEDs were flashing sequentially was 240 hertz, which gives you a full frame rate of 80 hertz, which is not standard. They had some special material that they were showing at that rate. And one thing I noticed right away I could easily see what's called the rainbow effect.

05:07
If you've ever watched a DLP projector a single chip DLP projector you may have seen what's called the rainbow effect, because a single chip DLP works the same way. It shows all the red pixels first and then all the green pixels and then all the blue pixels in a very fast rotation. And if you have an image, that's say, a bright light on a dark background, and you move your eyes around which everybody does to one degree or another it's a natural thing. It's a natural thing. It looks like that bright light is being followed by a rainbow because of the red, green and blue happening sequentially. The same thing happened on this set, which I found very interesting. I don't think it's really going to go anywhere, to tell you the truth. I would rather have all of them firing at the same time and use color filters. It was also very difficult to get that photograph because, you know, taking a picture with a digital camera was sometimes the picture came out looking really weird color-wise. So not that that's really a concern when you're watching tv, but uh, it, it did. It was kind of interesting. Anyway, I thought that was something to show you.

06:36
Now. I talked about lg and their g5 oled tv in episode 483. They have started a new uh technology called primary rgb tandem, which is a different structure of oled materials. I didn't get a photo of the of this at uh display week, but they did have it there and they had it side by side with the G4, which was last year's model, which used the older structure, and its picture was, in fact, brighter. So you know, I think this new OLED technology, primary RGB tandem, is a good development in the world of OLED and I would take a look at that.

07:29
They also introduced another new technology which is not in any commercial product yet. It's called hybrid tandem OLED and in this case you have two layers of blue OLED material. One of them is fluorescent and one of them is phosphorescent. Both of them are excited under UV light or blue light, and the fluorescent is excited just as long as the light is on, and when the light turns off it stops glowing instantly, whereas phosphorescent blue material it maintains its glow for a little while and at first I thought well, how is that useful? Because if the blue is going to linger, it's going to lag and stay on even after the light turns off. That's going to screw up the image royally. But I learned that the phosphorescent blue only lasts a few microseconds, so it's not really going to be a problem for the image.

08:40
What it gains you is decreased power consumption. It's much more efficient, so you don't need to hit it with as much light image. What it gains you is decreased power consumption. It's much more efficient, so you don't need to hit it with as much light and it and it. It works much better that way. It doesn't require as much power.

08:55
In this image we see a side-by-side photo of two 13 inch prototypes. They are 2752 by 2064 pixels, which is 264 pixels per inch, generating a maximum peak brightness of 600 nits, and you can't really. They had power meters next to each of these and you can't really see them in this picture. But I took a closer look and the one on the left, which is conventional OLED, is consuming 318 watts according to that power meter. The hybrid on the right is consuming 248. So quite a bit less. And that's the point of this hybrid tandem OLED. Will we see it in a real product? Probably in a year or two, if it turns out to be economically feasible to manufacture.

09:54
So one of the biggest advantages or the biggest developments in display technology over the last few years has been quantum dots. I've talked about that a lot on the show and one of the primary companies involved in the manufacture of QuantumDots themselves is Nanasis and they were at the show and they showed once again their roadmap to QuantumDot development. And here it is. At the top is what we currently have, mostly QDEF quantum dot enhancement film, which is basically placed. It's a film that's placed in front of a blue backlight and the film is impregnated with red and green quantum dots. So when the blue light hits it. The red quantum dots re-emit red photons and the green ones re-emit green photons. Some of the blue light gets through without hitting a quantum dot and when you combine blue, green and red you get white. In this image you can see the QDef and the XQDef, which is just the enhancement film incorporated into the diffuser plate which is part of an LCD TV structure, and there were examples of that all over the show and there are tons of them on the market. I've talked about it on a variety of shows here on Home Theater Geeks.

11:25
What I was more interested in was the next one down called QDCC quantum dot color conversion. This is what QD OLED is. We can see here's an example of the Samsung QD OLED, last year's on the left, this year's on the right. It's a form of quantum dot color conversion where blue OLED material shines into a little tiny cell of green quantum dots and they convert the blue into green and another tiny cell subpixel of red quantum dots and they reconvert the blue into green and another tiny cell sub pixel of red quantum dots and they reconvert the blue into red and then there's a clear cell where the blue from the blue OLED just shines straight through and once again, you get red, green and blue and you can form a full color image. These are the sub pixels of each pixel in the OLED. These are the sub pixels of each pixel in the OLED. Now, in the case of the Samsung scene here, 2024 claimed a peak brightness of 3000 nits. 2025, 4000 nits, so they're just refining and improving this technology, which they've had for a couple of years. Sony has had it for a couple of years, and so that's part of QDCC.

12:49
One thing I hadn't seen before in the color conversion was shown by a company called InnoLux, and they had a 100-inch, 101-inch micro LED display. So these are microscopic LEDs that are emitting their own light. But to get red, green and blue well, red and green anyway they actually coded the inside of the LED itself with red or green quantum dots. So that gives you direct emission from the micro LEDs and instead of having to make red or green LEDs by other means, you can make them with quantum dots, and that is a new thing and that could really be good. I didn't get any of the specs on this one. Unfortunately. This is the only photo that I didn't take of the ones I'm showing you today. This was taken by my good friend, jeff Urich at Nanasis. He was stuck at his booth most of the time, but he did get around the show a little bit and he saw a bunch of things that quantum dots were being used in, all of which concern him and his company greatly. But I wanted to show you this picture because it's the first example I know of quantum dot color conversion in a micro LED display and I think I would imagine it's going to allow it to be brighter and more pure in color and have less problems with that phosphors give you, which is how micro LEDs and other LEDs can be made to show other colors, and I'm going to show you more about that in a little bit, so stick around for that.

14:49
Okay, in the roadmap that we showed you before, the ultimate goal is called QDEL or electroluminescent, in which quantum dots give off color not when stimulated by light, but when stimulated by electricity. This would make them similar to OLED in that they would be emitting light directly under electrical stimulation, like OLED material does not when hit by light, and color converting, as we saw in the last couple of examples. This is the holy grail and we don't have any commercial products yet, but for the last couple of years, we've seen examples of prototypes from companies like Samsung Display, which is the R&D arm of Samsung, which also has Samsung consumer electronics, from which we buy TVs. So here's a picture of their what they call ELQD electro-luminescent quantum dots. This thing is 18.2 inches diagonally, 3200 by 1800 pixels, 400 nits peak brightness, with what they claim is 86% of BT 2020 color gamut, and it doesn't use color filters, interestingly enough. So it's very efficient, which means it should be able to get brighter than that. 400 nits isn't that bright, but this is a prototype. They're still working on it. It's a very difficult technology to make and it looked fabulous. I mean, the colors are gorgeous. I mean it looks, the colors are gorgeous.

16:44
This company, boe, which I showed you an example their field sequential RGB LED also showed a quantum dot electroluminescent display. This one's only 7.9 inches, which means a pixel density of 560 pixels per inch, which is really, really dense. They claim over 90% BT 2020 and a contrast ratio of 10 million to one. Now, that's a small thing. It's more of a tablet-sized thing than a TV-sized thing, but again, it's a prototype. They're working on this technology.

17:35
Okay, back in the Nanosys booth, they had a couple of really nice demos, one of which was looking at QD OLED in a monitor versus W OLED. W OLED is the more conventional OLED, which has a red, green and blue subpixel and a white subpixel to allow it to increase its brightness, and that works fine. But it has other drawbacks and QuantumDots solved those drawbacks with the QuantumDot color conversion, so they had a picture or they had two monitors next to each other. I didn't get a picture of the monitors, but here's the info card anyway and you can see they were using a Samsung Odyssey G8 monitor, which is a QD OLED, and another monitor which was a W OLED, the conventional OLED, and they were both the same size. They both had the same resolution, the same single luminance gamut, that is, the colors that could be reproduced at a given luminance, probably a medium luminance and the same peak luminance, roughly of 1,000 nits in the case of the WOLED 976. Okay, so roughly the same.

19:07
However, look at this diagram. The bottom right of each of these segments, you see another kind of a weird color multicolored shape. That multicolored shape with a bunch of lines in it is a new type of depiction of color volume. That is, how does the color reproduce at different brightness levels. This is something called gamut rings, and it's way too much to get into right now. I'm going to do another show just on this, because it's really, really cool and it's a new thing that has recently come out. It's now implemented in CalMAN calibration software, but basically what it shows you is on the top, the Odyssey G8, you see colors throughout the entire diagram, and when you look at the bottom, the W OLED monitor, you see the colors kind of poop out as you get towards the edges of the display, of this depiction and it goes to gray of this depiction and it goes to gray. Basically, the center of this diagram is the darkest light output, the lowest light output, and the outside edge is the highest light output. So the WOLED monitor. As you get brighter and brighter and brighter, the colors become less and less saturated until they finally disappear. And so you'll notice the DCI-P3, it's a little hard to see here. Color gamut, they're calling it. I would call it color volume is 98% in the QD OLED and it's only 51.8% in the W OLED. So what that's saying is that the W OLED can't keep colors saturated all the way to the highest brightness, whereas a QD OLED can, which is why QD OLED is such a much better technology than the W OLED.

21:20
Also, in the Nanosys booth was another really cool demo, and I actually took some video of it. So I want to show you that they were both related to quantum dots versus phosphors, and the point of these demos was to show that certain phosphors have a problem called lag, which means that when you you stimulate them with light, they glow, and when you turn off the light, they continue to glow. This is not unlike the hybrid OLED, but instead of continuing to glow for microseconds, they glow for milliseconds. So here's this video and this is a film, and the left side of the film is phosphors and the right side is quantum dots. And notice the spot of light that's actually a blue light that's shining on this white material, and on the left side the red sort of splotch that's following that light. That is the phosphor lag of the red phosphor called KSF is the name of that particular red phosphor, and you'll notice no lag on the left side of the image because that's quantum dots. So the spot of white light that you're seeing is actually blue and it's shining on these films, and on the left you have phosphors, red and green phosphors that combine with the blue light that's reflecting off this film to give you a white spot. You can see the blue halo around it and in the right side you have red and green quantum dots. So that was a pretty cool image, a demonstration of how red phosphors really lag. And if you have a bright image on the screen and it's moving around really fast, you could easily see that red lag if you have a phosphor-based display.

23:42
The other video I wanted to show you was two monitors next to each other, one phosphor-based, ksf phosphor-based, and one QDEF, a quantum dot film. And here we have white lines being scrolled back and forth and you see, you can see some again, some red and even some green trailing in the KSF phosphor image that you don't see in the QDF image. And they showed that also in this image down below, which I can show you in a photograph that I took of that image, which is a real-time image of what's happening in that display, in that test pattern of the white bars moving back and forth. So on the left you have the phosphor-based display and the lights actually come on at zero milliseconds and the backlight and this is an LCD TV, led TV or monitor, and they stay on for a little while and they turn off. But notice, after they turn off the red line continues and that's the red phosphor decaying. And even before the frame turns on, the LEDs turn on, you get a little bit of red before they come on. That's the decay from the previous frame. Now you notice also these two little bumps on either side of the main bump in the center. Those are during the black frame insertion right. So in black frame insertion you insert a black frame between the active frames and the reason is to improve motion blur. But even though the LCD panel is off, the shutters are closed, the backlight flashes and still a little bit of light gets through. Backlight flashes and a still little bit of light gets through, which is why LCD TVs are never going to reach as deep black as OLED. But you notice, on the right there are no red trailing little trails after the actual pulse of light or even before, because quantum dots do not have any lag or any afterglow, if you will. They just don't, which is one reason why quantum dots are so much better than phosphors when it comes to displays. So these were all very interesting demonstrations at Nanesis and I want to thank Jeff for being such a great host there at his booth and showing me all around.

27:12
Okay, last thing to talk about is micro LED. We saw one earlier from Inelux which was using Quantum Dot color conversion, but there were other conventional micro LEDs on display. One in particular I thought was pretty cool was on the outside of the TCL Seesot booth. This is 219 inches wide. Now, since micro LEDs are tiles, they're small tiles, roughly a foot square more or less. You can put together as many of them as you want into almost any shape. And so they put together this 219 inch wide, 36 by 9 display which had 5760 by 1440 pixels and a pixel pitch that is the distance between individual pixels at just over 0.9 millimeter, and they claimed a contrast ratio of a million to one. The other one that I took a picture of was from a company called Vistar. That one is 88 inches. Peak brightness, up to 2000 nits, contrast ratio they said was 26,000 to one and a smaller pixel pitch of 0.5 millimeter half a millimeter which they claimed covered over 99% of DCI-P3 color gamut. And it looked beautiful. It just looked great.

28:44
Microled, I think, is a great display technology and will make its way into the consumer market to some degree. It's still so expensive. One of the reasons for that is that the placement of the micro LEDs has to be perfect there can be no flaw, and so the failure rate in manufacturing is pretty high. Still, it's sort of the ultimate in display technology and it's already being used on things like news sets and in movie and TV production Really really big ones used as virtual sets Instead of green screen. They put these things behind the actors and it looks like where they're supposed to be. So this is another technology to look at, and it was certainly there at display week 2025, which was really great fun. I don't normally go to consumer or trade shows much anymore, but this one was close by and Jeff was there my friend and I wanted to go see him and I wanted to see these new technologies, because I am, after all, a home theater geek. So I hope you enjoyed the trip along with me to SID Display Week 2025.

30:11
Now if you have a question for me, you can send it right along to htg at twittv. I like to answer those questions here on the show and I will do so as often as I can, and, as you know, all of Twitch shows are now on YouTube for free, but with advertising. If you want to go ad-free, join the club, but with advertising. If you want to go ad-free, join the club. Go to twittv slash club twit and join up to see all the shows ad-free and get the ability to come into the Discord channel and talk tech with all the geeks.

30:53
Until next time, geek out. Hey, home theater geek fans, I'm here to let you know that I'm going to do a special show on Wednesday, june 25th, right after Intelligent Machines. So if you're in the chat room for that show, stick around, because I'm going to be answering questions live from the chat room for that show. Stick around, because I'm going to be answering questions live from the chat room all home theater related, of course, nothing else. But if you got a home theater question for me and you're in the chat room, that's the time to ask it, because I'll be watching the chat room and answering those questions as best I can.