on the friday before ces started lg announced that they'd be unveiling a
lineup of real ak tvs for 2020. hell
yeah ak is finally becoming wait a second why did lg say real 8k so
many times in this release it's in the headline it's italicized which must be
for emphasis because it doesn't appear to be part of the branding
could lg be implying that someone else perhaps a major competitor like i don't
know samsung does not have real 8k
did samsung really create its own certification program because their aka
tvs couldn't meet the same specs as lg's
okay now i'm curious so i went down a rabbit hole to find out which 2020 aktvs
are actually legitimate for consumers to buy
all the scandalous details after this message from our sponsor pulseway don't
have employees to send to work or ces for you pulseway lets you remotely
monitor manage and control all your Windows mac and Linux machines from one
app create your free account and try it out using the link below
in september 2019 the consumer technology association or cta the same
group that puts on ces announced the official industry display definition and
logo for 8k ultra high definition televisions the idea is that consumers
laying down serious money for an ak tv will be able to see this logo on the box
and trust that the tv inside the box is capable of the performance you'd expect
things like having 7680 by 4320 pixels
inputs that deliver content at that resolution at 60 frames per second and
the ability to upscale content from lower resolutions because let's face it
elon musk will probably be living on mars before most of us will be able to
stream aka movies from netflix but there's another requirement in this
certification that might sound a little weird to you the one that's at the
center of all this controversy the cta spec states a display shall meet a
minimum of 50 contrast modulation using a 1x1 grill
pattern what the heck is contrast modulation well lg actually had a
contrast modulation demo at their booth back at ifa 2019. that was in september
where they showed their 2019 8k tv
squaring off against an other 8k display which many people
thought to be from samsung in the demo a microscope panned over
both tvs showing the clarity or lack thereof of the displays from super close
up the obviously worst competing brand was only capable of a contrast
modulation of about 12 far below the cta 8k ultra hd threshold
of 50 and not even close to the 90 level of
lg's 8k tvs and i mean if these pixels look blurry then does it
even matter how many of them you have is your tv still 8k then on january 1st
2020 samsung made the eyebrow raising announcement that there would be a
different sticker on the box of their ak tvs a certification from a group called
the 8k association a group that has samsung as a founding member but lg
isn't involved at all and critically a
certification spec that as far as anyone knows does not include any targets for
contrast modulation and the funny thing is almost the exact same thing happened
just a couple of years ago except it was samsung taking shots at lg for having
blurry screens check out this samsung blog from 2016 where they amplify the
icdms that's the international committee for display metrology
conclusion that contrast modulation is quoting the optimal criterion for
display resolution measurement and that reporting contrast modulation numbers
would be mandatory in other words instead of defining resolution by raw
pixel count we should be using the perception of clarity and right now
contrast modulation seems to be the best way to quantify that the reason
that samsung was trumpeting contrast modulation back in 2016 was because back
then it was lg who was putting out displays with suspicious 4k performance
so on those ones rather than using an RGB sub pixel arrangement this lineup of
entry to mid-level tvs used rgbw panels
meaning that every fourth pixel simply shone white while this increased the
brightness of the screen these lcds could not achieve full uhd resolution in
color because 25 of the pixels weren't
contributing to that so in a sense they could only pull off 4k with
monochromatic resolution test patterns fast forward to the current 8k battle
and all of lg's new lcds use RGB screens
and it's a completely separate issue that's hurting samsung basically the
contrast modulation of their 2019 ak the one that lg likely had in their
microscope demo was being lowered in exchange for increasing viewing angles
everyone knows that ips panels have awesome 178 degree viewing angles right
that's one reason everyone's buying ips pc monitors instead of faster tns
but remember ips is proprietary to lg
and in the past lg has even sued samsung for infringing on their ips patents so
the reason why samsung's 2019 8k had
viewing angle issues while lg's did not was because samsung's panels are v8
which are known to have deeper blacks but narrower viewing angles
therefore samsung decided to employ a couple of techniques to widen their
viewing angles sub pixel dithering and
more importantly a film that scattered light horizontally but degraded clarity
now none of this means that samsung went out and started its own consortium
to bypass the all-important contrast modulation spec doesn't mean that while
it is true that samsung is a founding member of the 8k association and that
the group believes its certification criteria should be determined by its
members the group's been around since 2018. it has a lot of really big
companies in it that aren't samsung and there isn't any reason why lg couldn't
join the ak association now but here's a better indicator than any of those
samsung says that for 2020 they've sorted out their priorities and all
their aktvs will have contrast modulation figures in excess of the 50
target all this hollow blue about them not having real 8k only applied to their
2019 aks which i hope no one bought
anyway samsung even went as far as to tell me that consumers will see both the
cta and 8k association logos on their
packaging two different stickers however
that little tidbit has been known for almost a week already yet just two days
ago lg uploaded this video which still has real ak in the title so is lg
deliberately spreading disinformation or did some lonely social media manager
just not get the memo or care enough to edit their scheduled youtube post
yeah probably that hold on i'm getting a real command from
Linus that's right it's Linus from hq here
whipping out my pulse way the real time remote monitoring and management
software that helps you fix problems on the go by sending commands from any
mobile device no matter how bizarre the shape of it is i mean
no you can't actually control employees directly but pulseway is compatible with
Windows mac and Linux and the remote desktop functionality gives you access
to your system's real-time status system resources logged in users network
performance Windows updates and more all from a single app try it for free and
save 20 when you sign up for the team's plan at the link in the video
description so thanks for watching guys if you like this video give it a thumbs up be sure to subscribe and hit us up at
lttstore.com where you can buy sick stealth hoodies like this one