In my quest for the most immersive home theater viewing experience, I've done it all.
Spent over $10,000 on the largest TV in the world, violated export restrictions,
and even ordered sketchy scam products from AliExpress.
And it was all for nothing! Because Hisense has made all my efforts obsolete with their brand new RGB Tri-Chroma 116UX.
Behind me is the world's largest consumer TV.
But more importantly, behind me is the world's first mini-LED TV with an RGB backlight.
I gotta say, I didn't see this one coming. I thought quantum dots were the path forward for mini-LED for the foreseeable future,
but think about it. Why would you excite colored quantum dots with blue light to make color
when you could just produce the desired color in the first place?
The level of saturation that they're achieving here defies any expectations that I could have had.
Just like I'm going to saturate your ears with this message from our sponsor.
Normally when a TV brand starts talking about their on-board AI and image processing,
I kind of tune out. Just give me my filmmaker mode and my low latency game mode and ditch the rest, okay?
But according to Hisense, their new Highview AI Engine X is more than just a buzzword solid of an SOC.
It boasts improvements of 40% to CPU, 70% to neural processing, and 100% to the GPU,
resulting in a chip that for the first time ever has the performance that they need
to bring their RGB backlighting to the market.
Because the idea is kind of obvious, right?
If you could take your red pixel and blast a red backlight through it instead of a white backlight,
you're going to end up with otherworldly performance. And the same goes for any other combination of light.
But the processing required to do this with low latency just hasn't been practical up until now.
See, every one of those individual colored LEDs in the backlight is capable of 65,000 levels of brightness
and needs its output level perfectly balanced against both of its partner LEDs in the other colors.
Adding another layer of complexity, the TV features full array local dimming in order to boost contrast.
So your total output intensity needs to be balanced again to ensure that you're not getting big halos
when you see a bright object moving against a dark background.
Now, Hisense isn't giving us a dimming zone count at this time,
but if I had to guess from the demo footage, I would say it's actually a bit less than their
last generation Halo product, the 110UX, which had 40,000 zones.
If I'm right, I suspect this comes down to two factors.
The colossal processing requirements of doing this many zones with RGB rather than just controlling
luminance and the impressive performance that they were able to achieve without that many zones.
Even in its pre-release state, the backlight control looks very strong with nearly OLED level
blacks even against eye-searingly bright objects.
Oh, speaking of eye-searing, there are some speeds and feeds they were willing to give us.
They're boasting 10,000 nit peak brightness, which I actually believe, given that the 110UX
exceeded that in our testing. They're boasting 97% coverage of the BT 2020 color space.
That would be class-leading. Pantone and Pantone flesh certification and upgraded 6.2.2 integrated audio.
Though I maintain that if you're using onboard audio on a TV like this,
you are living breathing proof that money simply doesn't buy taste.
The last cool thing was hiding in plain sight, but is great news for my poor aging body.
And that is the thickness. To be clear, I don't need my TV to be paper thin or anything,
but the 110UX was freaking thick and freaking heavy.
I mean, so is the 116UX, but it's less thick.
So maybe I'll be able to get it mounted in my theater room without too much trouble?
Or maybe I shouldn't bother. Right on the other side of this display island,
Hisense is showing off their first consumer micro LED sets at 108 inches, 136 inches,
and a whopping 163 inches.
Now there are even fewer details on these. 10,000 nitpick brightness, 95% coverage BT 2020, and that's about it.
No availability, no pricing, and like every micro LED set that I've seen,
you're going to be looking at seams between the panels if you don't align them absolutely perfectly.
But hey, this is Hisense's first attempt. Why don't we go over to Samsung and see how they're doing on micro LED?
I mean, somebody must be buying the wall series because it's back and slowly, agonizingly slowly,
maybe making its way toward attainable pricing? And they most certainly have.
This older version Samsung micro LED TV is made up of a bunch of different modules
so you can lego them together to create pretty much any size
or aspect ratio TV that you desire, assuming that you have luxury car money to drop on a TV.
The problem is though that on the sides of each module
is a tiny bit of plastic for the electrical connections to go through,
and with certain content you can see these little creases between each module,
but not anymore. This is their new micro LED prototype TV with through glass via technology.
Basically they have used lasers to make super small holes
to connect the circuits between each individual module
so there's effectively no gap between the mini LED modules anymore.
Samsung does say that if you get up to like one or three inches away from it,
you might be able to see them, but I have tried pretty hard
and I have not been able to see any of the seams yet.
This specific micro LED TV is 143 inches with a 21 by 9 aspect ratio
for that real cinematic look and it is 10,000 nits
just like that high-sense one that Linus was looking at, but I was suspecting looking at it even though this is incredible,
that that high-sense one was a little bit better in the color department.
If only we had another RGB micro LED TV that just so happens to be right beside it,
and it turns out that we do. Samsung also has a prototype RGB micro LED TV here
that confirms that the technology just truly wins for color reproduction.
This right here has the exact same color vibrance of that high-sense and man.
I cannot wait for you guys to be able to see TVs like this in the future
because it looks incredible. There's so much more here at the show this year,
stretchable micro LEDs from the major players for automotive and other commercial applications.
There's that weird battery-powered TV that suction cups to the wall for reasons,
but those will have to wait for another day and another segue to our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out our coverage of NVIDIA's big announcements.
I was the first to game on the RTX 5090 and it was pretty sick.