We struggled to find a front page story this week for LDM, although we probably had too many for MDM. However, we managed to find something!
While the switch to OLED is gathering momentum for smartphones, TV remains a big challenge. LG seems to be currently winning the battle for the hearts and minds of those that really care about image quality. However, I still have some worries about the future development of OLED which has issues in matching the colour volume and peak brightness of the best LCDs. What is strange is that Samsung is not really pushing LCD technology to be as good as possible, using edge lighting rather than direct addressing on its high end sets. That means that its LCD TVs aren’t as good as they could be, or as good as the best from some of their competitors.
That’s slightly surprising. If I was at Samsung in the TV division, I would want to have the very best LCD TVs in the world in terms of picture quality in my range if I was going to position the technology against OLED. I would be prepared to sacrifice something in margin to ensure that my market leadership was matched by technology leadership. To do less than that compromises the brand, it seems to me. As I’ve written before, the Apple approach of making a really good product and then making buyers pay for that seems a better long term strategy than just building down to price points.
Samsung failed in its attempt to develop OLED TVs that it could mass produce commercially, so it has pinned its colours to the mast of Quantum Dot (QD), and for the moment QD LCDs. The current QD in the backlight technology is pretty good, but you also need a good backlight. The next generation of QD TV, with quantum dots in the place of the colour filter should give the technology a big boost and has the promise of finally removing one of the key disadvantages of LCDs, that is to say, varying performance according to the viewing angle.
However, I was talking to someone the other day about the concept and we discussed that this concept might have a snag. If you make the QDs very good at reacting to blue light, what happens to a TV used in an environment with a lot of daylight or a lot of blue light from, for example, bright LED lights? Wouldn’t the QDs react to the ambient light as well as the backlight? That might impact the best achievable black level and reinforce the advantage of OLED in that area. It might also impact colour accuracy as you would have green and red QDs, but not blue, so the ambient light would add red and green, but not blue. This kind of effect is not a problem if the QDs are the other side of the LCD from the ambient light as they are at the moment in Samsung’s sets.
A few years ago, white LED backlights were seen as a two to three year ‘interim solution’ to fill in until RGB backlights came along. RGB backlights have a lot of advantages in performance and efficiency. However, white LEDs are so much easier to engineer, RGB backlighting has almost gone away. In the same way, it’s not impossible that the current QD in the backlight solution might linger on as the best way to use QDs in LCDs for some years.
Bob
