Samsung's New TVs Are Almost Invisible (qz.com) 158
Mike Murphy reports via Quartz of Samsung's new top-of-the-line televisions announced at an event in New York today: Samsung's new QLED line of 4K TVs features a technology the company is calling "Ambient Mode." Before you mount the TV, you'll snap a picture of the wall it's going to hang on -- it doesn't matter if it's brick, wood, patterned wallpaper, or just a white wall -- and then after it's up, you can set that picture as the TV's background. The result is something that looks like a floating black rectangle mounted on a wall. Samsung even includes a digital version of the shadow this black rectangle would cast on the wall, as if there really wasn't a large LED panel sitting in the middle of the thin metal strips. There are five QLED models, with minor tweaks between them, ranging in size from 49 inches, up to an absolutely massive 88 inches. The televisions have a built-in timer so that the ambient setting will turn off after a while, in order to spare your electricity bill. Viewing the televisions before Samsung's event, the ambient really did appear to blend them into the walls at first blush. One, against a fake brick wall, was indistinguishable from what was behind it until you really got close up to the screen. The distinction on another, attempting to mimic a painted off-white wall, was a little more obvious. But that's not really the point -- the mode is just intended to give the illusion of invisibility between watching TV, and when you want to show off your new television to a visitor. Pricing isn't available but you can expect them to range from a few thousands dollars all the way up to $20,000 for the largest, sharpest models. Samsung also announced that it's partnering with The Weather Channel, The New York Times, and others to overlay content on the ambient TVs. They will also be able to control any smart device that can control to Samsung's SmartThings system, like Amazon Echoes, Ring doorbells, and Philips Hue Lights. Bixby is baked into the remote to help you search for content and cater to commands.
Invisible tvs! (Score:1)
That's stupid.
Re:Invisible tvs! (Score:5, Insightful)
you know whats more so stupid? you can do this same thing with any tv you can put a picture on.
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I was just thinking that, I've got a bunch of TVs in the office that when we're not using them for meetings show pictures from team-building trips and what have you using a $30 Chromecast.
I think I just saved the company $19,970, I should ask for a raise.
Energy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Energy (Score:5, Informative)
You have to read all the way to the 5th sentence to see that there is a timer that turns it off.
Re:Energy (Score:5, Interesting)
(and if it's not a 3D, curved screen, you're not really buying into the marketing, anyway)
Re:Energy (Score:5, Funny)
What it really needs is the option to make it look like the wall, but every so often it distorts the image in the shape of a tormented face trying to get through. Do it either really fast for the jump scare, or really slow so people get uneasy until it finally hits them. Gotta keep the house guests on their toes.
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Not only the guests... it could be an undocumented feature. Or maybe someone could hack Samsung and update the software.
Screen Saver (Score:4, Funny)
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Your house, not mine.
Better idea (Score:2)
Go outside and snap a picture of what you would see if the TV was a window and have that, or a short length animation with the trees gently moving in the breeze. Unless you had a crappy view of an alleyway or something similar on that side.
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Personally I would prefer a series of video streams, recorded or live of pleasant surroundings with pleasant music (here's a favourite https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]), probably adjusted to time for my local with a living view adjusted for better night or day light visuals. As for power, well I will replace my windows with their problematic insulation, questionable view (not true I have a fantastic view especially sunsets, I enjoy seeing storms roll in) with solar panels and size does count.
So Samsung wa
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Re:Screen Saver (Score:4, Interesting)
something like: http://astronaut.io/ [astronaut.io] (shows short clips from random youtube videos with low counts and names like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321)
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What does Peter Noone of Hermit's Hermits, have to do with this?
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They already know noone is buying into the 3D and curved screen marketing
Not no one. My wife bought a curved TV. She also bought an iPhone X.
Our economy depends on people like her.
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And why make it look like the wall, instead of making it look like a picture in a frame, instead of an expanse of wood, brick, whatever?
(and if it's not a 3D, curved screen, you're not really buying into the marketing, anyway)
They make one of those [qz.com] too.
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And why make it look like the wall, instead of making it look like a picture in a frame, instead of an expanse of wood, brick, whatever?
(and if it's not a 3D, curved screen, you're not really buying into the marketing, anyway)
Hmm, a good sized window is say 3'x5' or roughly 15 square feet. This is comparable to around a 70" tv. A typical 70" tv uses about 185W which is about 631 btu/hr. Assuming my math is correct, an R4 window of about that size is going to lose or gain about 112.5BTU/hr if the outside temperature is 30 degrees different. (30*15)/4=112.5.
If we ignore everything else and assume a tv replaces a window, and that somehow the area behind the tv is now almost perfectly insulated, that yields the tv costing about
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"And why make it look like the wall,"
It'd be more fun to make it look like an archway going to an adjacent room or a garden and watch people walk into it.
====
But seriously, I imagine that people with more money than sense -- no shortage of THOSE -- will find uses for these. Put up a famous picture -- The Nightwatch or September Morn. And change it occasionally.
Heck, there might even be some useful things these things can do.
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Re: Energy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Energy (Score:4, Interesting)
Too bad that many jobs where you earn enough to burn $20k on a TV won't leave you enough time to enjoy a trip around the world.
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Some good, high paying jobs pay for you to go round the world (like to other company offices, expo's etc).
Re: Energy (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience, the difference between offices/hotels in different parts of the world isn't worth the travel time.
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If I had $150k to burn on a TV, I'd buy one of these invisible TVs and use the rest to pay hush money to a porn star for keeping photos of my little dick off of the internet.
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Lol.
You Trumped his response.
Re: Energy (Score:4, Informative)
If I had $20k to burn on a TV, I'd buy a used one on Craigslist for $500 ...
Have you checked TV prices lately? For $500 you can get a pretty darn good brand new TV. Costco has a 55" inch 4K UHD TV for $420.
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The Element sets seem to not be great, but FWIW last year I bought a TCL 43" 4k Roku TV for $350 or so for our new place - existing 60" wouldn't fit above the fireplace. It looks and operates really well, I have no complaints.
"A few thousand" for a 49" is ludicrous, even if full of useless gimmicks like 3D, 240hz, etc.
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Many, er, ... service providers... will give you a trip "around the world" for a lot less than $19,500.
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If you had 20k to burn on a TV you'd be buying it and getting someone to install it for you while you're already traveling around the world. Don't apply or people thinking to rich people toys.
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If I had $20k to burn on a TV, I'd buy a used one on Craigslist for $500 and take a trip around the world.
I bought my 50" Pioneer Elite plasma TV on Craigslist for $60. It was probably over $6000 when new.
It may not be state of the art now but I think the picture is great.
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2 chicks at the same time.
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If it's doing its invisible thing, it's using power.
If it's not doing its invisible thing, it might as well not have an invisible thing. It's just a gimmick.
Not to mention being an unwanted lightsource when the room is dark. Unless you switch it off, in which case you've got a big arse tv visible in the dark.
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That reminds me of the time, ages ago, when flying toasters ruled the screensaver world and a manager asked ``Wouldn't turning the monitor off be an even better way to save the screen? And keep our power usage down?'' as he looked out across the cubicle farm housing dozens and dozens of power-hungry CRT monitors all running screensavers.
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Ahh. 30 Seconds Over Winterland.
Have you seen the saucers?
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*Not actually perfect, since color e-ink sucks.
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You could save even more power if you made your TV look like a scrying mirror [youtube.com]
Actually on an OLED you could take advantage of the excellent contrast ratio and zero power for black pixels to have demonic faces appear very faintly on the TV is scrying mirror mode. Not all the time, perhaps just late at night when people come in and turn off the lights, just before they leave the room. A sort of 'you can see it out of the corner of your eye' thing.
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>You're using energy 24/7 making your TeeVee appear invisible?
Don't forget showing ads.
Samsung is infamous for patching firmware after release to cause the input bars to display ads on them, despite selling TVs that don't have ads.
I returned two of them, the second after I disabled firmware updates, and the TV updated the firmware anyway to have ads.
I won't buy Samsung now, period. I even switched my phones away from Samsung. They can burn in hell.
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Re: Energy (Score:1)
If you have $20k you have electricity, no?
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No you need to have a 'w' and a 'h' after that to have electricity. Right now you just have a really cold temperature which is the opposite of having a lot of energy!
Edge TV (Score:4, Interesting)
Next up will be the Samsung Edge TV. It's just like the current TV, only the screen extends and curves a bit at the edges, so there is no black rectangle frame at the end of the screen. Sure, it's even more pointless than the edge on their phones, but when they're charging a premium for anything that makes them cooler than a TCL or Vizio TV, there's nothing they won't try.
Now if they had a passive color E-Ink display or the like, that would be really cool. Then you don't have to feel guilty about the power when leaving the screen on to have it blend in with the wall (or appear to be a painting, or whatever). Of course, good luck getting such a display to handle motion and extreme contrast that makes for a quality television. And good luck getting such a display at anything resembling HDTV resolutions, let alone 4K.
I don't get it (Score:3, Funny)
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It's only invisible when it's "off". Of course in this case "off" is somewhat dubious because it is presumably still using the full amount of electricity to achieve this "off" effect.
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Most TVs hang on the walls these days and if you look at the picture, it's more of blending in with the background than completely invisible. I don't really see much difference from this and pretending to be a painting or fireplace.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Funny)
Re:How do you watch an invisible TV? (Score:2)
You close your eyes.
PSA: "QLED" is a con (Score:5, Informative)
The name is meant to imply that it's comparable to OLED technology, but the reality is that it's just regular old LED technology. It IS NOT anywhere nearly as good as real OLED. And only LG makes *real* OLEDs, not Samsung.
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I have a fully calibrated plasma projector system. Nothing beats the warmth and the dynamic range.
Warmth? You mean it lowers the colour temperature? How is that good?
Dynamic range? So it can handle more than 8-bits per channel?
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Q isn't the same as O! In fact, it's two better!
Re:PSA: "QLED" is a con (Score:4, Informative)
QLED is a con, but for entirely different reasons than you state. Samsung where extremely light on details when they introduced their QLED televisions, but questioning by AV sites revealed that these are not electroluminescent quantum dot displays, but are in fact LCD displays with a quantum dot backlight. It's a lot like Samsung's so called LED displays, that are again just LCD displays with an LED backlight. There's no denying that these quantum dot LCDs are a significant improvement over standard LCD, but they still possess many of the drawbacks of LCD, and to market them as quantum dot displays is misleading.
Companies are working on true electroluminescent quantum dot displays, with BOE being the first to demonstrate prototypes. There are some pictures here [oled-info.com], and another article here [avsforum.com]. There's a video somewhere but I can't find it right now. Digitimes reported that Samsung have prototype electroluminescent quantum dot displays that they have not yet shown publicly, and other Chinese manufacturers besides BOE are working on the technology.
It still looks like its a good few years before we'll see commercial electroluminescent quantum dot displays, and micro-LED displays may have taken off by then. I'm still waiting for a decent computer monitor. It is insane that nearly 20 years later you still can't get a monitor that comes close to the Sony GPD-FW900.
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And yet side by side next to LGs OLEDs they look quite comparable. No one cares that the marketing term doesn't match the science behind it. You can't call it a "con" when it in fact shows all the performance and features you expect.
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and you should too.
Not at all. In fact their use of QLED is entirely consistent with the entire industry which described LED TVs to define the technology that sits behind the LED. QLED TVs do use Quantum Dots and LEDs. Just because the technology isn't exactly applied where you want it to doesn't make it a con.
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Too much extra shit (Score:3)
Nope. Not gonna use a TV connected to the Internet. That's dumb.
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Re:Too much extra shit (Score:4, Insightful)
How are you going to get video to appear on the TV without Internet?
Using one of the myriad of devices that can connect to the internet in a secure, controlled and controllable manner, then provide that content to the TV using one of the industry standard inputs.
With no fucking adverts, no camera or microphone in the TV monitoring you, no removal of specific applications because the media company stopped paying the TV manufacturer, etc.
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How are you going to get video to appear on the TV without Internet?
The USB port on the side of mine works great!
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What's not invisible (Score:1)
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Wow! Inoovation! (Score:1)
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My existing 2011 LG television does this already (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, I did mount it on a black wall...
A Challenge (Score:2)
Before you mount the TV, you'll snap a picture of the wall it's going to hang on
So, what happens if I mount this TV on one of the inner glass walls in the new Apple Campus...
I already got one :) (Score:1)
so.. Samsung have reinvented desktop wallpaper? (Score:4, Funny)
Subject says it all.
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No they've invented real wallpaper.
Wow! (Score:2)
Excellent idea!
Whoa Nellie! (Score:4, Interesting)
Wait for it........Serve you stuff that makes the whole thing pointless. So now you can be served those fine advertisements on a beautiful background that looks like your wall. Wowsers, what a brave new world full of wonder and promise.
The Emperor's New TV (Score:3)
"How do you like my new invisible TV? All of the shows on it say what a fantastic job I'm doing."
"It's tremendous, Mr President. Really spectacular. Now, can we get back to the national security briefing?"
black is back (Score:3)
A Cunning Plan (Score:4, Funny)
Here is something for you hackers out there to try.
The simple version: In a room with no exterior windows, set a large TV/monitor into a wall. Surround it by a window frame. Display the view you'd expect to see from your building, if there actually was a window there.
Elaboration 0: Use a camera to feed a live view of outside to the 'window'.
Elaboration 1: Have weird things happen occasionally in the view: UFO, Godzilla attack, albatross flying into the "window", tsunami, pyroclastic flow, spiderman.
Elaboration 2: Have some cameras inside the room and some AI to identify and track human heads. By whatever method, pick one head as the victim. Feed the location of that head to the display software, so it will display the view with the correct parallax for that viewpoint.
Once you add the parallax, I think this could be very convincing to any unsuspecting viewer.
I disclaim any responsibility for the effects this could have on the viewer, or consequences that the viewer or others might visit upon the trickster. Consult your own ethics and lawyers and (if relevant) your institution's ethics review board.
glossy (Score:3)
>"Viewing the televisions before Samsung's event, the ambient really did appear to blend them into the walls at first blush."
Except that Samsung and apparently most of the other manufacturers are in love with stupid, GLOSSY screens. So no, it will not be invisible, it will reflect every stray light and everything else, even when it is on. (Can you tell I am a fan of now nearly unobtainable MATT displays?)
I can guess their "sample" setup was engineered VERY carefully to try and hide the actual reality of reflections that would be present in any real-world use.
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That's "matte". Matt is my brother.
This seems like a good Roku Channel idea. (Score:1)
Seems like a good Roku Channel idea.
Also, wonder if the TV will work the same in all light levels (including lights off). Does it?
The article photo is photoshopped (Score:2)
No way it's going to blend THAT well with the wall.
Think about it. Have you ever taken a picture, then held up the camera to the thing you just photographed to compare? The colors are always a little bit off. And think about the way the room's colors change from dim to bright and back with time of day and weather conditions. There's no way the TV is going to be able to compensate for changing lighting conditions.
You'd be better off just displaying a random picture, like a big digital picture frame.
In a perfect world... (Score:2)
Not true: it is a Samsung product after all. (Score:2)
Our TV already is invisible (Score:1)
It's been in its box in the cellar for years, since we didn't use it.
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Why in the world did "area man" take so long to show up? Did you move out of the area?
Good old Samsung (Score:2)
Birds (Score:2)
Hope you don't have any pet birds or mount the TV outdoors.
Sharp has better option (Score:2)
Pro Tip: (Score:1)
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And which you could do on any display device if you could be bothered to.
Sure it makes a nice meme image from a certain angle if you spent the time to photoshop it just right. Otherwise it looks like someone took a photo of the wall and then showed it on the TV.
And if it was REALLY convincing, even from an amateur taking the picture themselves, I'd be amazed. Most people have plain walls, surely, nowadays? You may as well just put a flat background of the right colour on it.