… when you buy an insanely expensive MicroLED screen.
A mobile phone with headphones included? It’s for pingers. Mega TV with other huge mega TV included is what Samsung is trying to sell in Korea.
Camera Samsung
Message to everyone who has almost one and a half million kroner to spare and who just must used right away: Samsung would love to have them.
They have created a Micro LED TV that is so outrageously expensive that they include a “conventionally unattainable” TV with the purchase. If you’re crazy enough to shop for the new-fangled mega screen, you’ll also get two hotel nights and a discount on speakers, according to Techspot.com.
If you buy the new 114-inch Micro LED screen for the living room, you get an 85-inch Neo QLED TV with 8K worth NOK 85,000 included in the purchase.
The two hotel nights at a luxury hotel in Seuol should be worth around NOK 24,000.
Micro LED is (still) on the way
Micro LED as a technology has been around for years, and Samsung is perhaps the player who has worked the most on it. The challenge has been to reduce the size of the individual LED lights, without the production cost becoming too high.
In recent years they have had a few commercial Micro LED products alongside their regular Neo QLED and OLED displays.
But all of these have been extremely expensive, and beyond the reach of most consumers.
Huge brightness
Generally speaking, it is increasingly difficult to maintain high brightness the larger a screen is. This has consequences for heat management, power consumption and how the entire screen is built.
Samsung’s new 114-inch will manage a whopping 2,000 nits overall. With such enormous brightness in such a huge screen, one wonders whether you shouldn’t also invest in sunglasses and factor 50 before the football match.
Currently, there is a very long way between the Micro LED TVs out there.
Camera Ole Henrik Johansen, Tek.no
Not available here
Currently, the TV is not for sale anywhere outside of South Korea, so what it would cost here is not known. But we were there when a copy of last year’s 110-inch edition was installed at Aker Brygge.
That TV cost around NOK 1.5 million and was assembled from 192 separate elements before it arrived in Norway.
Always costs a lot at the start
17 years ago, an 11-inch OLED screen from Sony cost $2,500 to buy. At the time, we were just about “finished” with the first generation of “flattening” our TVs, and early, often pale LCD screens were in most living rooms – while some had huge and rather heavy plasma screens.
You were the king of the pile if you had a Pioneer Kuro screen of 65 inches – also a stone beast in its time.
Prices creep down, sizes creep up
Today, the size of conventional flat screens with far better picture quality is creeping up to 100 inches. And if you don’t need the top model with 8K, you won’t necessarily pay close to NOK 80,000 for the fun either.
Time will tell if Micro LED has embarked on the same price and availability journey as OLED. As before, both OLED and LCD are still improving in quality. But LG and Sony are also betting on Micro LED, so Samsung is not alone in chasing progress.
But certain things you can currently only get with Micro LED, including the enormous brightness and assumed total absence of burn-in over time.
