everything you learned today will be irrelevant in six months that's what one
expert told me about micro lead or micro led the emerging display technology
that's supposed to offer all of the benefits of OLED like deep blacks and
practically instantaneous pixel response times without any of the drawbacks that
oleds are notorious for like low brightness short life span and of course
burn in micro lead is everywhere at ces 2020
both from brands you know and some you don't but i have some questions like why are
all these first displays so huge are they really gonna completely replace
OLED and most importantly what needs to happen before riley can
get his car drive down to best buy and pluck a 65-inch micro lead off the shelf
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all the different micro led screens on the show floor seem to have two things
in common they're huge and they all use a modular structure so
instead of being one big piece of glass like the tv in your living room these
led video walls are made up of smaller screens called cabinets that are say 27
or 36 inches diagonal these cabinets can be arranged in any funky configuration
or aspect ratio that you want and they're electronically independent of
one another meaning one part of the screen shining at full brightness for
example does not make another part of the screen dimmer like it does on lcd or
OLED because the cabinets aren't sharing a single input current and a rapid
samsung even told me that the cabinets are hot swappable so if one cabinet died
in the middle of you watching a movie you could theoretically pull it out grab
a new one and replace it without ever having to stop the movie not bad now
technically if you wanted to increase the resolution of your led video wall
all you'd have to do is add more cabinets and potentially more of the
controllers that the cabinets plug into on the back since any screen that's 3840
pixels wide by 2160 pixels tall is 4k
uhd right well sort it but that doesn't help riley
get his 65-inch micro led tv does it no for that we have to stuff more pixels
into a smaller area in other words we have to decrease pixel pitch
that's the center to center distance between neighboring pixels and it's one
of the key specs of the cabinets that make up the led walls the prototype
75-inch 4k wall that samsung has at their booth right now at cs 2020 has a
pixel pitch of 0.43 millimeters for example however decreasing pixel pitch
can actually impact black levels because the space between pixels is usually
covered with a shader basically it's a black plastic that absorbs light the
less space between pixels the less black there is for you to look at that's one
reason why samsung adds an optional dark coating to the cabinet's surface
even though it makes the display more reflective which messes with the micro
leads otherwise perfect viewing angles hey wait a second james did you just say
that samsung already made a prototype 75-inch micro lid that's tv size
can't they just put that all in one screen screen instead of a bunch of
cabinets and call it the world's first micro led tv well mister they actually
could do that today sure it would be ridiculously expensive
but these modular video walls are expensive too
the reason everyone's taking this modular approach is because it actually
makes business sense to do that today
because for every one rich guy's house where you can install a samsung wall or
a sony crystal led the kind of rich guy who could afford our theoretical tv
there's a hundred literally 100 business
customers who want a large led video wall often costing even more money
okay smart guy if it's really about money then what has to happen before
micro led tvs are cheap enough for me on my internet tech news host salary
the answer my mustache friend has to do with three manufacturing constraints
wafer cost throughput and yield
similar to cpus micro leds are grown on
wafers each wafer is covered in dyes which represent the micro leds but take
a second to appreciate how many dies this is a 4k tv has over 8 million
pixels and each pixel is gonna need at least three micro leds for RGB red blue
and green factor in our old friend pixel pitch and
you've got millions of dies with unused space in between them taking up valuable
wafer real estate to the tune of about five thousand dollars for one 55-inch
screen compare that to about 400 bucks for an
OLED but that's not all all of those dies have to be picked up by a stamp and
then moved over to the tv substrate a process called mass transfer
the stamp moves back and forth and back and forth for all the dyes in a process
that currently takes hours that low level of factory throughput is
just unacceptable when you're talking about a mass market product like tv is
where you need to be able to make millions per year but hold on because it gets even worse
once all the dyes are transferred only then can you turn the display on so to
speak to see how many of them are actually working yields of 99.5
are attainable now but that's not enough because if 0.5 of 24 million dies are
broken you have to fix over 1.2 million
dies meaning a little laser has to then move over each dead led and replace it
reducing throughput by a few hours more but remember when i said everything you
learned today will be irrelevant in six months even while here at ces companies
have announced manufacturing techniques that aim to drastically cut the cost of
micro led production so who knows if we're lucky maybe even at ces 2021 when
riley's mustache is just a little more silver samsung will show a prototype
micro led tv of that precious man's dreams
sleep well little prince
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