The commentary around a highlight at Display Week 2023, BOE’s 110-inch 16K UHD display, is worth noting. As I said in an earlier post, BOE really needs to figure out a better consumer-facing strategy.
It’s not that the product didn’t have the desired impact, a giant display and world’s first moniker is bound to generate some enthusiasm at a show about displays. It’s just that the consumer press are the wrong audience for this approach. Samsung has it kind of easy because the pro-Android journalists are going to curry favor with the company, whatever it does, because of its smartphones, and the pro-Apple journalists are going to want to stay close in anticipation of any threats to the iPhone. Yes, tech journalists have a lot of biases, and their access to brands is very much dictated by their openness to the brands’ messages.
Forget 8K. Here’s the world’s first 110-inch 16K display unveiled by BOE at #Displayweek2023. LCD-based, max 400 nits. The resolution is unreal though, no visible pixels even right up close. pic.twitter.com/kS7Tx0r4ZN
— Vincent Teoh (@Vincent_Teoh) May 23, 2023
Again, the ebb and flow of hype around displays in the consumer press is worth tracking because there is a herd mentality, most of it dictated by the need to create vast quantities of content, quickly, and repeatedly, in order to gain traction on social media, and search engines. Good news travels fast, just not as fast as bad news.
My guess is that a charm offensive by BOE will turn around any qualms that consumer journalists may have about its technology. It’s not going to be fun, but right now, despite its significant position as a Chinese manufacturer with worldwide reach, BOE lacks the brand appeal of its competitors. I don’t believe that I am wrong in believing that to be a disadvantage that will get amplified the more time goes on and will hurt the bottom line in what is an increasingly combative market for displays.
To put those specs in perspective, the Samsung QN95B Neo QLED TV — one of the best TVs of last year — has a peak brightness of around 2,900 nits and a 20,000:1 contrast ratio. The BOE display has 16 times as many pixels as last year’s premium Samsung QLED TV, but those pixels are objectively worse looking.
Tom’s Guide
