News JVTech OLED TV: a terrible duel between LG and Samsung is coming in 2024, CES announcements prove it
Published on 01/09/2024 at 17:37
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For the past 3 years the world of OLED televisions has been troubled by the war between two manufacturers, two Korean giants: LG and Samsung. CES 2024 is underway, and we have a lot of information about the next best 4K TVs on the market.
In the thumbnail you will find the Samsung S95D on the left and the LG M4 on the right
CES 2024 launches hostilities on the OLED TV ranges
CES 2024 in Las Vegas is now
CES is the biggest high tech show in the world. It takes place in Las Vegas every year in early January. The opportunity for the world’s largest manufacturers to preview their products to the public and technology professionals. We then see rows of screens, each more impressive than the last. Although Micro-LED, the best display technology, is still massively present in Las Vegas for its wow effect, it is not what interests us today. For what ? Because a Micro-LED screen still costs around 1,000 euros… per inch. Yes yes, you read it right, the large Micro-LED panels proudly displayed cost something like 100,000 euros. Apart from a few footballers and other millionaires, no one believes it. No, what we are most interested in are OLED ads.
What is OLED?
Before we dive deeper, let’s get back to the basics: what is OLED? This is a display technology, a type of screen if you will. Schematically we could divide display technologies into two large groups: LCD screens on the one hand and OLED screens on the other. A classic LCD screen, by far the most widespread on the market, is made up of a multitude of layers. At its base we find a backlit panel made up of small white light diodes. Colored filters are positioned above this panel whose purpose is to return the image to be displayed. The nice thing about OLED is that there is no backlit panel. An OLED panel is made up of so-called “self-emissive” (which individually emit their own light) or “organic” pixels. This has several very direct and very easily observable consequences even for an inexperienced eye:
- OLED displays are made up of fewer “layers”, so there are many more of them fins (and more flexible, hence for example the appearance of foldable smartphones) than LCD screens;
- Viewing OLED screens perfect blacks. We then speak of “infinite” contrast since a black pixel is simply turned off.
- OLED screens offer numerous advantages such as excellent viewing angles, ultra-fast response times or even the elimination of bloom around the brightest areas of the image (have you ever noticed a sort of halo effect around subtitles, for example?).
In short, OLED is amazing. Even today, classic OLED and its QD-OLED variant only improve year after year and 4K televisions that use this technology are considered by all the experts in the world to be the best on the consumer market.
The legendary rivalry between the Koreans of LG and Samsung
About ten years ago, the Korean manufacturer LG placed a lot of emphasis on the then nascent OLED technology. It should be noted that this was a risky bet at the time. Producing large OLED panels was very expensive (even more than today) and offered no guarantee of results. OLED screens had, among other things, major problems with marking and brightness.
Fortunately for LG, the gamble paid off. For years, LG Display factories were the only ones in the world capable of producing OLED in television format. Thus, when the technology matured and other manufacturers such as Sony, Panasonic or Philips became involved, they all had to buy their panels from LG.
Samsung, for its part, has long avoided OLEDs. The problem is that Samsung is the world leader in the television market and it is out of the question for the company to leave a direct competitor in an almost monopolistic situation in such a promising market for the future. In 2022, as OLED took care of its marking and brightness issues, Samsung display factories began producing their own version of OLED, QD-OLED. It was a success, QD-OLED panels are great.
Since 2022, every year, there has been a battle to see who, LG or Samsung, will be able to produce the best OLED panels. Last year LG won in maximum brightness conditions, but the QD-OLED panels were considered better in terms of details and colors. We can’t wait to see what’s new in 2024!
LG is banking on its processor and artificial intelligence for this year’s 4K OLED lineup
I have already talked to you in depth about all the LG 4K OLED TV ranges for 2024. You can find this long article right here. Here we summarize most of the innovations proposed this year by the brand, still a leader in the OLED market.
We note the highest end, where the war with Samsung takes place 2 important changes :
- Screens range from 120 to 144 Hz and get a G-Sync certification. Great news for PC gamers who connect their machine to their TV.
- A new supercharged chip is on the way. Called Alpha 11, this processor will be 4 times more powerful than last year’s, particularly in managing the TV’s artificial intelligence. This AI is constantly used to improve the final rendering of what is displayed on the screen, both to convert a Full HD image to 4K and to refine the details of each scene. For example, AI will be able to understand the mood of a scene and slightly adjust colorimetry on a shot-by-shot basis to best suit filmmakers’ intentions. Nice surprise: DRM protected content will also be processed! The Alpha 11 has 2.5GB of RAM, which is huge for a TV. Alpha 11 also allows improvements in sound: remastering of voices to make them more audible during action scenes, virtualization in 11.1.2 for well-equipped people, etc.
In short, after focusing on brightness in 2023, LG is now working on image processing thanks to a powerful processor.
Samsung is evolving QD-OLED once again
Samsung considers sales in 2022 and 2023 encouraging. In 2024, the Seoul giant therefore intends to accelerate in terms of OLED, in particular by launching more ranges than last year to cover more needs (and align with LG to compete with them everywhere) .
At the highest end, Samsung announces 4 important news:
- New brightness gain at the top.
- Arrival of 144 Hz…like LG.
- Processor improvement. We have less information about Samsung processors than about LG ones.
- And above all, arrival of a new crazy anti-glare filter called “OLED Glare Free”. People who saw it in action at CES were speechless: Even in lots of bright light, the image barely moves.
We can’t wait to try the M3, LG’s elite, and the S95D, Samsung’s elite. Will one of the two Korean manufacturers be able to surpass the other in 2024? The answer when the products come out in spring.
2024-01-09 16:37:35
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