RGB LED Is Getting Its Time in the Spotlight. Will TV Shoppers Tune In? (pcmag.com) 49
Samsung, Hisense, TCL and Sony presented RGB LED TVs at IFA in Berlin last month. The technology replaces each standard LED backlight with a trio of red, green and blue LEDs to expand the range of colors a screen can display. Each manufacturer is using different name for the technology: Hisense has called it RGB-MiniLED, Samsung named it Micro RGB, Sony introduced Sony RGB Technology, and TCL branded it RGB Micro LED. The companies previously tried other monikers at CES.
Avi Greengart of Techsponential told PCMag the difference in color fidelity was not subtle when he viewed Samsung's version. PCMag found the Hisense 116UX the brightest TV with the widest color range he had evaluated. Both the 116-inch Hisense and Samsung's 115-inch model list at $30,000. TCL introduced RGB sets in China at prices starting at the equivalent of $1,150 for a 65-inch model. Greengart cautioned that it remained unclear whether the technology would rapidly decline in price or stay expensive like MicroLED.
Avi Greengart of Techsponential told PCMag the difference in color fidelity was not subtle when he viewed Samsung's version. PCMag found the Hisense 116UX the brightest TV with the widest color range he had evaluated. Both the 116-inch Hisense and Samsung's 115-inch model list at $30,000. TCL introduced RGB sets in China at prices starting at the equivalent of $1,150 for a 65-inch model. Greengart cautioned that it remained unclear whether the technology would rapidly decline in price or stay expensive like MicroLED.
Not a shopper (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Not a shopper (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, the writeup reads like any number of audio golden-ears reviews where the new gadget is always vastly clearer, more distinct, better soundstage, etc than the previous, which that was vastly clearer, more distinct, better soundstage, etc, than its predecessor, which in turn was vastly clearer, more distinct, better soundstage, etc than the one before. Which makes you wonder why they spent $10,000 on the previous model if it was so obviously inferior.
And then a non-golden-ears person does an A/B test on the same gear and can't tell the difference no matter how hard they try.
It just displays whatever you want? (Score:2)
That sounds pretty smart.
Re: (Score:2)
They don't make them like they used to. RTings is currently doing a years long burn in reliability test with a bunch of TV's to see how they hold up.
2+ Year Longevity Update! More Failures and What’s Next For Our 100+ TV Test [youtube.com]
Particularly interesting to see the failure modes, on a Sony set a single backlight LED failed and it shuts down the entire display.
Re:Not a shopper (Score:4, Interesting)
my dad is a TV service person here in Argentina. We work for that major dutch brand that is now owned by a chinese holding company.
90% of today's repair work is disassembling the entire display panel and replace individual LEDs. the other 10% is telling people their problems are due to bad wifi reception.
once that's done, replace the PSU's feedback resistor to run the new LEDs at a lower current
pro tip: as soon as you buy a TV, open it up and replace that resistor. Sure, your warranty will be voided, but you won't need it if you run the LEDs at 90% instead of 110%, like they do to stand out at a big box store under bright lights, next to everyone else doing the same.
ah i forgot another surprisingly common failure mode: cats peeing on the screen.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
>ah i forgot another surprisingly common failure mode: cats peeing on the screen.
fluufffyyy!
Re: (Score:2)
Very cool that you're rescuing these things instead of trashing them. Did he do general repairs for screens, curious what TV you or he would purchase yourself. Like when you ask a mechanic what car they'd buy.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not really rescuing them yet. We're doing warranty repairs. The backlight LEDs are driven so hard they fail within the warranty period. It's ridiculous.
We do out of warranty repairs too of course.
As for which TV to buy, it's a difficult question. The grass is always greener on the other side. If you work for Sony you see a lot of Sonys and you'd think Sony is bad.
Re: (Score:2)
Can you just turn down the brightness on the LED backlight? Seems easier than replacing the resistor, and has the same effect of running them at a lower current.
I suppose the cheaper ones might be doing PWM dimming which means that the peak current is still going to be high.
Re: (Score:2)
"Brightness" and "Backlight" are two separate controls in LCD TVs. You can check this with your TV. Go to the menu and you'll see the two separate controls. If you dial down the brightness, the backlight bleed stays the same.
Brightness is a software adjustment that affects the displayed image, and backlight physically turns down the LED intensity.
Shit-grade TVs don't control the LED intensity. They run them at 100% all the time and just software-dim the picture.
Re: (Score:2)
I purchased a Samsung 40" back in 2010 that still works fine. A friend recently upgraded from his curved 55" Samsung to something larger and gave me the 55". Now I have two old TVs that work just fine with the 40" as a backup. Purchasing the newest tech rarely pays off, and besides, these new "smart" TVs are annoying as fuck. No thanks. I use an HTPC I build years ago running Kodi attached to my NAS. What more does anyone need? The TV is just a dumb monitor, the way it should be.
Re: (Score:2)
No matter what new features a new TV offers, why would I willingly expose myself to snooping and advertising? Thanks, but no thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
Same with my 22" Samsung dumb HDTV and many other stuff that still work well. Even my OminCube, KVM from Y2K, still works.
Re: (Score:2)
My 32" Samsung dumb TV (which I only use for watching over-the-air TV with all my other stuff done on my PC) still works just fine and I also have no plan to replace it anytime soon.
"Expand" the range? (Score:2, Interesting)
This technology still builds the color image with red, green, and blue pixels, just with a different mechanism for presenting them. I don't see how this "expands" the available range of colors.
Re: (Score:2)
By either increasing the gap between the brightest white and blackest black, or the number of steps between the brightest R, G, or B and black.
Re: (Score:2)
Then it expands the intensity range, not the actual color range. I read TFS/TFA as meaning the latter, because that is actually what it said.
Adding more steps makes the color-range less granular, but doesn't increase it.
Re: (Score:2)
The online definition of granular is "made of, consisting of, or seeming like granules". From this, I surmise "less granular" means the granules are less apparent, i.e., smaller. One can continue to make the granules smaller until they are no longer perceived, i.e., not apparently granular at all.
But there appears to be confusion on this matter. *shrug*
Re: (Score:2)
I can see how you got that but that's not what the word means. Try looking up granularity instead.
Re: (Score:2)
"Colour" is created by stimulating the three types of cone cell in your retina. Being able to stimulate them with a greater range and granularity of intensities, particularly on the bottom end, increases the colour gamut.
The problem with regular LCDs is that the crystals aren't perfectly effective at blocking out the light so your blue always has a bit of red and green in it, etc. If you're actually creating the red, green and blue light then you can just not do that, which gives you access to pure red, blu
Re: "Expand" the range? (Score:2)
How do you expect the number of possible colors to increase? I've described two ways. Sure, you can add additional component colors but you can mix almost any color with just RGB.
Re: (Score:3)
Read up about about color gamut. I was a skeptic of HDR until I saw true HDR content presented on an OLED TV in a dark room. It really does make a huge difference, simply in the vibrancy of the image. This goes beyond saturation and contrast.
It has actually been a big failing with LCD TVs... they really aren't capable of good HDR. Maybe this technology can bridge the gap.
Re:"Expand" the range? (Score:5, Interesting)
LCDs are not perfect. When fully off, they still leak some light through. When fully on, there is some transmission loss. A pixel technology with zero light leakage (because it has no backlight) can therefore show a wider range of intensities for each color channel, and thus a wider range of colors.
If you look at it from the perspective of 8-bit-per-pixel RGB, the theoretical range is 255 intensity levels per channel, but if LCDs lose the bottom 10% that leaves 230 available levels (theoretical 0-255 versus practical 25-255).
All of that said, I wonder how visible the difference is. This seems like something that would be easy to game by playing with the signal processing. It would be interesting to see results from double-blind testing, from an organization that doesn't depend on advertising dollars from the manufacturers in question. Hopefully prices on these eventually get reasonable enough for Consumer Reports to do some proper testing at some point.
Re: (Score:2)
LCDs are linear and your eyes are very much not, so the bottom end is extra important. I expect it makes a big difference, probably very similar to OLED, if the image is something with contiguous blocks of saturated colour at least as big as the LEDs.
Re: (Score:2)
+1, interesting
Re: (Score:3)
The colours able to be presented are muted thanks to the backlight being an imperfect colour source. The point of this is that by using a pure wavelength source like an LED as a backlight for a red scene behind the LCD panel, the LCD panel can display a redder red. Likewise for other colours (greens and cyans are the biggest beneficiaries to this, reds and blues less so).
Unfortunately there's a downside too. The backlight RGB LEDs have multiple pixels in front of them so that cant' produce a perfectly satur
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not quite. This is the latest evolution of backlit LCDs. Instead of the backlight being a grid of white LEDs, each of those LEDs is now RGB. So the color you see is a combination of the backlight and the LCD. But it's limited because each RGB will affect a large number of individual pixels.
It's not comparable to OLED where each individual pixel emits its own light. MicroLED [wikipedia.org] is, which has each pixel made up of tiny RGB LEDs. But this is not to be confused with TCL's "RGB Micro LED" mentioned in the summary.
Re: (Score:2)
No, this is still backlit LCDs.
The LEDs are still 'just' a backlight, but now a colored backlight. You basically have an OLED-like characteristic of emissive lighting at some resolution. The problem is the resolution of these LEDs would be something like a 128x78 display. Impossibly low even by old fashioned 'SD' standards.
So you have a 128x78 active LED display, and then an LCD panel on top to give it resolution. So you get to pick a good tiny local backlight color and minimize how much extraneous unwante
I guess this means it's that time again... (Score:3)
All the ads will be displaying colorful tropical birds and fish.
Re: (Score:2)
And clowns.
Re: (Score:2)
Looks like the displays have something like a 128x78 'pixel' active LED display as a backlight, and then put an LCD on top of it.
So if a tiny region of the display is just dim reds, then it can get a backlight that is doing just that and the LCD doesn't have to block as much other stuff.
such great technology to watch things (Score:1)
This is old tech (Score:1)
Just how "expanded" is the range? (Score:2)
Right, to TRULY expand the range, you'd also want vivid CMY pixels too. most displays simply can't show wicked vivid colors in those ranges, although yellow gets close:
if someone made a TV with THIS gamut and HDR, i'd buy it:
http://davecotter.com/screensh... [davecotter.com]
I miss vacuum tubes! (Score:1)
What are the chances? (Score:2)
I'm guessing that this whiz-bang improvement in realism and engagement is just the ticket to encourage adoption of TVs and monitors which either won't work, or will have key features crippled, unless you connect them to the internet so they can serve you ads, spy on you, and force some kind of subscription service after you've had the product for a while.
These days, when it comes to tech, with few exceptions true ownership of a product is rare and getting rarer. You pay for it, but the manufacturer in effec
Well, this settles it (Score:2)
I'm buying one of those new fangled RGB TV sets. Just in time for the Humphrey Bogart noir movie festival due to be broadcast soon.
Hype, who can tell the difference... (Score:2)
brightest?! (Score:2)
I don't get it. Brightest?!
I currently have the backlight on my oled set to 0. Yes, it's not a true backlight, because OLED is the "backlight" and display, but my point is...
It's too bright!
The same for my LCD monitor. It's at 1. My car's LCD is as far down as it can go, and driving in rural areas I have to put a cloth over it because it ruins night vision. It's all TOO BRIGHT! Why do people want it brighter? Why not just go stare at 10 suns instead?!? Wtf!