Home Theater Geeks 437 Transcript

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00:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
In this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I talk about my recent trip to Display Week 2024. So stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT. Hey there, scott Wilkinson. Here, the Home Theater Geek. In this episode, I'm going to talk about my recent visit to Display Week 2024.

00:37
It's an annual conference put on by the Society for Information Display and it is all about display technology behind the curtain. The people who exhibit there, the companies that exhibit there, are not LG Electronics, samsung Electronics, the people who sell TVs to consumers. It's the display research and development arms of those companies. So LG display and Samsung display, tcl, csot I don't know what that stands for and other companies, gigantic Chinese companies like AOE, auo I'll get that right and B-O-E, both of which produce panels for other manufacturers to turn into TVs.

01:34
And, as you might expect, quantum dots were all over the display hall and in all the seminars. Many of them in all the seminars, many of them, because that is the up and coming thing in consumer displays and professional displays as well. I use the Nanosys booth as my base of operations. They are the most prominent maker of raw quantum dots and they were acquired last year by, and they were acquired last year by Shoei Chemical, a Japanese company which just finished building a new plant in Itoshima, japan, that can produce enough quantum dots for 40 million TVs a year. Gigantic, much larger scale than Nanososis was able to achieve. But man, oh man, it was. Uh, it's, it's impressive, and it indicates that quantum dots are here to stay. They're going to be with us in tvs more and more as we move along.

02:42
So the biggest story at the show was electroluminescent quantum dots, or QDEL. Now, in this case, it's quantum dots that are stimulated to emit light directly by electrical signals, not by absorbing incoming blue light and then re-emitting green or red or another color, depending on their size. I've talked about this in previous shows, so I'm not going to go into a real deep dive on how quantum dots work. But dots work. But electroluminescent quantum dots, qdel. This is the holy grail of display technology direct emissive technology like plasma or OLED, but with the potential for much higher brightness and greater color saturation. So we've been hearing about this for years. At CES and at Display Week We've seen tiny little demos of very small prototypes of just red or just green or just blue. At this show we actually saw displays full color displays using QDEL Now. They aren't products yet, they're still prototypes. It's going to be a few years before we actually see a QDEL TV, but my friend Jeff Urich at Nanasis said that he thinks that this year will be the year that people look back at and say that's when QDEL really started taking off. So I thought I'd show you a quick picture of the roadmap of quantum dot development.

04:43
And so here we see QDEF, or enhancement film, and the next one down is XQDEF, which is quantum dot enhancement film in the diffuser plate of an LCD TV. And this is basically a blue backlight shining through a quantum dot film. And the quantum dot film is infused with red and green quantum dots. So the blue light and hits this film. Some of the blue light is absorbed by the red and green quantum dots, which then re-emit red or green, and some of the blue light passes through without the red and green quantum dots, which then re-emit red or green, and some of the blue light passes through without hitting any of the quantum dots. That gives you red, green and blue, which combined together makes white. Then that passes through the LCD panel. That actually lets more or less light through each subpixel. Subpixels then have color filters red, green and blue and that they combine to make a full color image Quantum dot color conversion, qdcc.

05:56
The third one down is what QD OLED is based on. It's a blue OLED, a bunch of blue OLED elements that fire blue light into what are called quantum dot conversion layers. So instead of color filters, we have each sub. One sub pixel has a tiny little bit of red quantum dot material, and here the goal is all of the blue light gets absorbed by that and converted into red. Same with the green. And in the case of the blue subpixel, there's no filter. There, there's no quantum dot color conversion layer. The blue light from the OLED just passes right on through, and so what you get is red, green and blue.

06:51
Now electroluminescent quantum dot, which is what I'm mostly going to be talking about today, labeled here nano LED, which is Sharp's name for the technology. Here we have red, green and blue quantum dot materials stimulated directly by electrical signals. There's no need for color filters, there's no need for color conversion. They just get a signal and start emitting red, green or blue light, and that then there's one triplet of each of those for each pixel and boom, you get a full color image.

07:37
Simplest way to do quantum dots, also the most difficult, which is why we don't have them yet in a commercial display. So there were three companies displaying QDEL Sharp, tcl and Samsung. And again, these are the display manufacturers, not the TV manufacturers. So the Sharp demo was in a secret room that was not easy to get into and thanks to my friend Jeff Urich at Nanosys, he got me in to see it and I thank him for that. Now, when I arrived, none other than Munji Bhavendi was there. He's one of the three scientists who last year received a Nobel Prize for essentially inventing quantum dots in the 1990s. Now I talked about the Nobel Prize and took a deeper dive into quantum dots generally on this show in episode 407. So I recommend that you check that out because that goes pretty deep into what quantum dots are and how they work.

08:48
So Sharp had two prototypes on display. They had a smartwatch-sized unit, which is seen here, and a larger panel which was about 12.3 inches in diameter, I'm pretty sure, 1920 by 720 pixel resolution, 167 pixels per inch Not terribly compact or not terribly high resolution, but you know, it's a start. The smartwatch was 1.39 inches, 454 by 454 pixels, 326 pixels per inch, so it was a little higher density there. The watch was very bright, but the panel was not. It was kind of dim, so I found that kind of interesting, but it was really a thrill to see Professor Bavendi there, and he was, of course, surrounded by lots of admirers. I didn't get a chance to say hi. I wish I could have, but too many people between me and him.

09:58
Tcl was showing something more interesting, I think a 14-inch laptop display using QDEL. It was created using inkjet printing techniques, which is going to be the way of the future for creating quantum dot displays. Its resolution was 2880 by 1800, and it was said to have more than 85% of the BT 2020 color space or color gamut, with 350 nits of peak brightness. I think if you put peak white on the entire screen, it would be 350 nits Contrast ratio, over a million to one and less than one millisecond response time. So these are some of the advantages of QDEL that I'm really looking forward to.

10:51
Samsung had the largest QDEL display prototype, which they call QDLED. It's 18.2 inches, with 3200 by 1800 resolution, 202 pixels per inch, 250 nits peak brightness, full screen, and it was also inkjet printed. That was the best looking one at the show in my opinion, that just really looked fantastic and pointed the way to a bright future, so to speak, for QDEL. Interesting, samsung also had a comparison of their QD OLED from last year and this year.

11:41
In this picture, the one on the left is the 2024 version and the one on the right is the 2023. The left is the 2024 version and the one on the right is the 2023. Now, granted, it's a picture from my iPhone, so it's not going to be very accurate, but they claim that the new one, the 2024 model, has 50% higher brightness 3,000 nits versus 2,000 in the 2023 model. But keep in mind that that figure is when displaying a 3% white window on a black background. Interestingly, that's with the same power consumption between the two. So they managed to increase the brightness without increasing power consumption, and that's pretty cool. And this advantage, this 50% advantage, disappears when you display a larger and larger full white window on the screen. For example, you get 820 nits versus 650 with a 25% window and 300 versus 250 nits with a 100% window. That is, the whole screen is filled with white. So not a big difference in a large bright area, more difference in a small bright area. I also wanted to point out that LG had its G4, its 2024 G series OLED, conventional OLED, 83-incher here. Higher brightness than before, again, 3,000 nits of peak brightness, 150 nits of color brightness that is if you take away the white part of it, and that's presumably in a 3% window and a 250-nit full-screen white thanks to what they call Meta Technology 2.0. So that was QDEL and very exciting.

13:37
Everybody on the show floor was talking about it. But that's not all that was shown. We had micro LED, which are tiny little microscopic LEDs that are direct emitting. It's going to be a competitor for QDEL, but I think they're going to serve two different markets. Microled is generally used to put together really large tiled displays. So you take a tile that's maybe a foot square, two feet square, and you put a bunch of them together and you can make a really big screen no-transcript display. That used blue LEDs with quantum dot color conversion, which we saw a picture of the diagram of how that worked a little earlier. The LEDs are 20 by 40 microns, micrometers. It was said to have an 8,000 to 1 contrast ratio and it's intended for museums and cinema displays. You could build this up to much larger than 106 with more tiles.

15:11
Now, one thing that really surprised me at this show was sort of the reappearance, in a way, of 3D. I thought 3D had come and gone, at least its latest iteration. Is it coming back again? I'm not sure, but there was some. At the show. Boe, a giant Chinese manufacturer of raw panels, had two. They had 110-inch autostereoscopic display.

15:41
3d display claimed 16K resolution, but it's actually 3840 by 2880 in 3D and the viewing distance is between two and a half and eight meters so you have to stand a certain distance away to get the 3D effect. They claimed less than 10% crosstalk, meaning that your right eye seeing the left eye image and vice versa. Well, 10% is still pretty high and as I walked around it I could still see the boundaries between the viewing cones and the image kind of ripples a little bit as you walk back and forth. They claim over 30 viewpoints so you can stand in one of 30 different positions to see the 3D, which is more than most auto stereo displays but still Total of 60 degree viewing angle. Okay, that's okay, and I could, as I say, I could still see the boundaries between the viewing cones, the viewpoints as they're called, and some rippling. So you know, it was the same old, same old that we've seen for years. No glasses, at least there's that. So you know, it was the same old, same old that we've seen for years. No glasses, at least there's that. But is it really worth having in your home? I'm not sure. Probably not for me.

17:07
Same company, boe, had a 32-inch light field display. This was more interesting, Much more sophisticated than conventional auto stereos. They said that they were using an optical film over the panel to control the direction of light from the pixels. Unfortunately, I couldn't learn much about how it works because the rep that was standing there didn't speak much English, so I don't really know how well it works or how it works. It did work well, though, or how it works. It did work well though.

17:42
That picture. You could see a protein, basically a picture of a protein floating in space, and it had much greater image stability than the auto stereo. Interestingly, lg was showing what it called the world's first 3D smartwatch. I didn't get a picture of it Using something they called micro OLED, which I don't know what that is, and I didn't know. There wasn't any information I could find about it, although they said also it was using light field technology, which is a better 3D technology than conventional auto stereo. It had field of view boundaries that I could see and it was a little bit on the fuzzy side, but it was said to be producing 9,000 nits of peak brightness and it was really really bright. Resolution was 3840 by 3840, so very high resolution, very high pixel density what you would use a 3D smartwatch for Not sure.

18:50
So one last thing from the show I was honored to meet Kenichiro Masaoka at the show. Honored to meet Kenichiro Masaoka at the show. Here's a picture of me and him. He's a scientist at NHK Science and Technology Research Laboratories, part of NHK, japan's broadcasting giant, now Kenichiro-san. He was the guy who invented BT-2020, the color gamut that high dynamic range is based on. So that was impressive enough, and we talked about how he came up with the primary wavelengths that are in BT2020. More recently, he has developed a brilliant new way to depict color volumes in a two-dimensional graphic.

19:41
This is very hard to do and I will be explaining this in a future episode. It's called Gamut Rings and it's really cool, but it's way too much to get into right now. I need a whole episode to do that. So that was toward the end of the day. I was only able to spend one day there and it was really really fun, super geeky, and so I thought you know what I'm going to talk about it on this show. Hope you enjoyed it.

20:11
Now, if you have a question for me, you can send an email to htg at twittv and I will answer as many as I can on the show and, as always, we thank you for your support of the Twit Network with your membership in Club Twit, which lets you watch the video of this show. You can always listen to the audio in your car on your walk. That's for free, but if you want to see the video and all these great graphics that I put together, then all you need to do is join club twit. It's very easy. You can also come into the discord channel and watch us make the show live. So hope you'll join us. Until next time, geek out.