Look, we've all been there. You want a bigger TV, but your partner ain't having none of that.
Luckily, at CES 2024, CCD has the solution.
For the low, low price of around a quarter million US dollars, you can have this.
Oh s***, forgot I'm standing in front of the dummy one.
This is the solution. CCD's N1 137 inch micro LED 4K HDR folding TV.
It's a, I mean, just look.
Have I not said enough?
God damn. You might have made the connection that seeing it in the kind of down mode versus now that that wasn't the full range of motion.
Typically, it's around 60 to 90 seconds to go from fully closed sculpture mode to the viewing experience.
It's just that the power in the booth here is not really set up for this.
And when they were setting up, it was kind of like, it was having a little bit of trouble.
Not really the best power. I actually got confirmation the rotation is like 90 degrees either way.
It won't go 180 all the way in one direction.
Still cool. We got a little, you know, room for improvement in the future, maybe for the $300,000 one.
Now, before you say that this isn't that cool, yes, there are folding phones and even folding laptops now.
Those are based on OLED, a technology we've all come to know and love.
This is micro led and it's quite a bit different.
You see, just like OLED, you get the actual proper, the pixel is off black.
But instead of OLED, where you're laying in a missive layer down on a substrate, it's actually individual pixels.
Individual LEDs that are, I guess, soldered together in some form.
And that's one of the reasons this TV is so fricking expensive.
Micro LED is a very new technology and it really has not reached that affordable price point yet.
And the reason for that is it's very hard to get the LEDs close enough together that you can't see them.
This is their 137 inch model, but they do go as small as 103 inches, which is apparently the smallest 4k micro LED display that you can buy.
You've probably heard of Samsung's The Wall, which is the same technology just at a larger pixel pitch, which means the pixels are further apart.
So even a huge company like Samsung that actually makes display panels has had a hard time getting those pixels or LEDs close enough that you could make a display that's high resolution and also small.
I mean, small is a bit of a stretch for 103 or 137 inches, but for the technology, it is quite small.
Samsung has shown smaller than these micro LED displays. They're just lower resolution and seemingly not actually purchasable, although this is kind of one of those things where you call for a quote.
You don't really just buy it off the website, right? Their current The Wall is around 0.6 millimeter pixel pitch, which means 0.6 millimeters between each of the LEDs.
This is around 0.4, which is what enables them to have this density, I guess you would call it, or this size.
And it is apparently unique to them. Small correction here. I found out the 137 inch model has a pixel pitch of 0.7 millimeters.
It's the 103 that goes down to 0.4 millimeters. If you go up to the full size, which is 165 inches, it's 0.9 millimeters.
And the reason for that is, well, they're all 4K. If you make the display bigger and you don't make the pixels farther apart from each other, you're just going to have a giant bezel and your screen's not any bigger.
You have to space the pixels out more to fill the space.
If you were to keep the pixel density the same, you would have to make the resolution higher.
And they do actually have 8K models, which is also the smallest size 8K micro LED display, apparently on the market right now.
They don't manufacture the tiles themselves in-house. They have a company that builds them for them, but they are built to their specifications.
So they are at least their tiles. Now, speaking of tiles, as you probably have noticed, this is not a monolithic panel.
There is a bunch of individual tiles. And if you look between the gap, you can actually see where each of them are.
And they're put together in what they call a wing, and the wings fold and unfold together to make the full display.
You might be wondering why nobody else has made a folding micro LED TV, and it's because it's not as easy as you'd think.
When you assemble a micro LED display out of tiles, you actually have to calibrate the display because the gap between each individual tile is never going to be quite the same.
And the human eye can pick up on weird variances like that very easily.
So traditionally, you take a fancy camera in a very dark room, and you calibrate the brightness of the pixels on the very edge to be brighter than the rest of the display so you don't see that gap to basically make up for it.
Well, if you add in the folding, despite the gap apparently being less than a millimeter, there is still variance each time you open and close it.
And if you don't account for that, you will see a jarring line in between the individual wings.
So they've added a sensor in between the wings that detects the distance on close and open to then adjust the brightness of those edge pixels to make it so you don't see it.
And to be honest, the effect is pretty convincing. Standing, I mean, what am I like six feet away, let's say, in the middle, I can't make out the individual pixels and I can't see any lines really.
If you go off axis, you can maybe start to see tiles, but you back up a little bit more, and it all just kind of blends into one.
That's a really big TV. And I like that there's no bezels. That's cool.
Naturally, something that's designed to be a showpiece like this doesn't exactly have HDMI ports just chilling on the back of the panel.
Each individual wing is connected at minimum with a duplex single mode fiber.
So there'd be five of these running from the control center to the actual TV itself.
There will also be two Ethernet cables, one of which is used for control and the other for the gap sensors.
I also asked if you can run Ethernet and you can, but instead of five fiber cables, it's 25 Ethernet cables, which is a lot more.
And kind of funny because inside of these panels, that fiber just gets converted back to Ethernet because the actual tiles like a standard video wall connect each individually with Ethernet.
And lastly, a power cable. So that's five single mode duplex fibers, two Ethernet and a power cable.
I'm not going to pretend to understand really like the mechanics going on there and I imagine they probably won't tell me, but it looks pretty baller.
I see some stipper motors in there behind this door that is unlocked is the video processing setup, which I'm not allowed to show you.
They're going to apparently give me an image of what it looks like.
So here it's literally a standard 19 inch rack with their video controller, which is a standard kind of off the shelf part that you would use for a tile video wall like this.
There's a Denon AVR, which they use for video switching. This is what you would plug your Xbox or whatever into, which is an important note.
Not really made for gaming. The display out there runs at a refresh rate of 30 Hertz.
It's fine for movies. It has HDR 10 plus, but no Dolby vision.
It's just really not great for gaming unless you game on a last gen console on your quarter million dollar TV.
Also, when there is a mini PC that they use for control, you can have the whole setup automated with Creston or other home automation things.
So you don't have to use a giant Siemens control panel to move the TV and the power stuff.
It's probably a power supply of some sort.
It does draw a fair bit of power. You're looking during operation on the 137 inch at around three kilowatts.
And then typical, which is just the display being a display is around 900 watts.
And it goes up based on size and down based on size.
Sounds like a lot. The Samsung wall also a lot.
It's just kind of the nature of the technology.
It will improve with time. Cost is going to be coming way down on these in the next five years.
They were saying that they suspect this $250,000 one to be closer to 100,000 in about five years, which is a monstrous amount of money still.
But shrink it down a little bit more.
Maybe you'll have a micro LED monitor on your desk one day.
Probably not one that folds, but still.
Now, a couple of burning questions. Yes, you can sit on it.
I did ask. He said that's the number one thing people ask him.
It's just kind of, should you sit on a quarter million dollar TV sculpture thing?
Can you get one that goes in the ground? Yes, it's called the M1.
They built this specifically for the baller penthouse where you can't dig like three feet into the concrete because that would be your downstairs neighbor.
They also make outdoor variants, which is actually where they started.
Those models have a bit higher pixel pitch, but also 4,000 nits brightness.
This one is about a thousand, which looks pretty bright, but we're also in kind of a covered area and that helps a lot.
If you were to put this outside, it would look super washed out.
I don't know what else there is to say other than I want one in my bedroom.
I'm probably not going to get that, but one day maybe.
So check CC'd out in the description if you have a quarter million dollars burning a hole in your pocket and you want to build a crazy TV like this.
They can apparently build them as big or sort of as small as you want.
Oh my God. It's just crazy.
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Like the video. Tell me, do you want this TV in your bedroom?
Would you get the one that goes in the ground instead?
How baller are you?