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Samsung Claims Its New QLED TVs Are Better Than OLED TVs (theverge.com) 190

Posted by BeauHD from the he-said-she-said dept.
Samsung recently unveiled its latest flagship televisions at CES 2017, the QLED series. The company is challenging the notion that OLED TVs represent the pinnacle of picture quality in the living room. According to Samsung, the QLED TV represents its best achievement in image quality and viewing experience yet. The Verge reports: Of course Samsung would say that at an event meant to showcase said product. But the company insists it's made very real improvements compared to the flagship TVs it unveiled only a year ago. One of those upgrades pertains to brightness. The QLED TVs reach a peak brightness between 1,500 and 2,000 nits -- up from the 1,000 peak from 2016's lineup. Color reproduction has also been improved. The QLED sets handle DCI-P3 "accurately" and are capable of reproducing "100 percent color volume" -- something Samsung claims to be a world first. "This means they can express all colors at any level of brightness -- with even the subtlest differences visible at the QLED's peak luminance -- between 1,500 and 2,000 nits." Samsung says all of this is possible because it's using a new metal material along with the quantum dot nanocrystals. On the software end, Samsung's 2017 TVs are still powered by Tizen and feature basically the same user interface as last year. But there are some new additions like a sports mode that aggregates scores and other content from your favorite teams and an expanded Music section that lets you Shazam music as it's playing in a TV show and immediately launch that track in Spotify another streaming services. Samsung is also looking to clean up how its TVs look in your living room. New this year is a clear-colored "Invisible Connection cable" that runs from the TV to an external breakout box where you'll find all the HDMI ports and other critical connections (besides power, which is a separate input).
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Samsung Claims Its New QLED TVs Are Better Than OLED TVs More

Samsung Claims Its New QLED TVs Are Better Than OLED TVs

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  • Now with Quantum LED... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @05:11PM (#53606899)
    ...it's both overscanning and underscanning at the same time.

    What's so hard about showing the picture as it was originally intended?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      What's so hard about showing the picture as it was originally intended?

      Since you ask...

      The director has a properly calibrated high end display. To match that on your screen, it also needs to be calibrated and capable of displaying a wide colour gamut. But your environment is probably very different to the director's, likely much brighter. So the TV has to compensate with very high contrast levels.

      Most people don't really want accuracy though. What sells is eye-popping colour and high brightness. If you go into a showroom you will find that Samsung TVs always have the brightnes

  • even if they can reproduce a larger subset of the color gamut than other TV they can't make all possible colors, using only a select green, blue and red prevents that.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They told me a Monster Cable would fix this problem.

      • only if it has iridium connectors and silver braiding to transport the ones and zeros in rigidly faithful and optically crisp manner from source to destination without distorting the subtle hueing of fundamental colors and the finer nuances of unsaturated pastels.

    • Color gamut isn't about making all the colors, it's making the appearance of all the colors, as interpreted by the human eye.

      • GP is right though. There are shades of cyan for instance you can never make by mixing any combination of a primary green and blue. Even representing some of those shades rely on computer's using gamuts that contain imaginary colours.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lgw ( 121541 )

          Yeah, to get it perfect you'd need 6 colors, not 3, including red and violet at the ends of the visible spectrum, and something near cyan and yellow. You can get quite close, however, with 3. Normal LCD is so bad when it comes to color that I welcome any new alternative, as my plasma screen is quite power hungry (and hot - 600W space heater).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

            6? Why not 5 or 7?
            Technically, you need an infinity of perfectly monochromatic sources to get it perfect.

            • Measurably yes, perceptually no. No human can perceive the difference between a 510nm monochromatic source and a 511nm monochromatic source, and a combination of two other colours that crosses this line close enough would not benefit from an additional line between them.

              The horseshoe plot is shaped like a horseshoe for a reason.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

                Yes, I understand this, the real question is "why 6?".
                How does 6 improve on 5? Why is 7+ unnecessary?
                Are there technical reasons, such as efficiency or the availability of light sources at the proper wavelengths?

                • Take a look at https://dot-color.com/category/color-gamut-standards/ [dot-color.com]. Make points along the periphery to represent monochromatic sources. Connect the points with lines. The area within the lines represents all the colors that can be produced with those monochromatic sources. With 3 sources, all the colors that exist in nature (Pointer's gamut) can just barely be shown (assuming normal vision and other reasonable things.) With 4 sources more colors ("unnatural") can be shown, mostly covering additional color

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by lgw ( 121541 )

                  You have 3 color receptors in your eyes, each of which has a bell curve [wikipedia.org] of responsiveness to frequency. These bell curves overlap, allowing you to tease out quite a bit of information about color from the strength of these 3 signals. Most colors we see are themselves bell curves of emitted frequency, because most light sources are.

                  You could fake all this exactly with 3 colors, if you could chose the specific 3 colors emitted on the fly for each pixel (three variables, three unknowns). But since you have t

                • Because horseshoes. Look at the horseshoe, try to approximate it with points, and then factor in a law of diminishing returns bearing in mind that for every single additional colour you need to add 8million additional pixels to a monitor. If your goal is perfection over all then 7+ is not enough. If your goal is to create a product that could best cover the human eyesight and still be sellable to a large number of humans you're looking at around 6.

        • Why? (Score:2)

          by Chrisq ( 894406 )
          Surely since we have three colour receptors in our eyes three colours at the peak frequency for each would be able to reproducce all colours? (excepting the small number of women who have two types of cone [wikipedia.org]

          • Except our colour receptors are not monochromatic and yet the devices we use to generate colour are (or at least getting even more close to). What you say is true if you can match the spectrum of each receptor perfectly and then control the simulation of each individual one.

            The math for colour analysis and conversion we did in our last year of uni brings back some bad memories. Like roll in the fetal position under the table kind of memories.

            • You're on the right track. To reproduce a particular color, you need to get the correct signal ratios from the R, G, B receptors. In general you can't achieve that with only 3 monochromatic inputs - you don't have enough input variables to control all th output functions.

          • A monochromatic source in the cyan region would excite the green and blue cones with less response by the red cones, than a combination of green and blue sources with the same green and blue cone response would excite the red comes. By causing less red cone response, the cyan source is perceived as purer.

        • Even representing some of those shades rely on computer's using gamuts that contain imaginary colours.

          Whenever I want imaginary colors, I just multiply my existing colors by i

          • Funny you should say that, it's exactly how the math sometimes works out when working in the ProPhotoRGB gamut.

      • WRONG, the "color gamut" ALREADY is built around human perception. A three color system cannot cover what the human eye can perceive.

    • The genericised form of the headline is actually:

      $vendor announces $newthing for TV, better than $oldthing

      with a subhead of:

      Everyone throw away your six-month old $5,000 TV and buy a new $5,000 TV that's exactly the same, only different.

  • Breaking News (Score:5, Funny)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @05:19PM (#53606939)
    Shock waves reverberate around the planet as Samsung claims it has better products than its competitors. This revolutionary marketing technique is sure to catch on with other companies and before long no one will admit they make second rate products publicly.

    • Re:Breaking News (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mikeiver1 ( 1630021 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @06:16PM (#53607241)
      That and the OS pushes adds on the desktop on boot of the display. No way to remove or turn them off. I have a pair of Samsung plasma displays and like them but the new 4K I bought for my desktop PC has this issue and it pisses me off to no end. Even if the display is marginally better than the LG OLED I will not buy another samsung display because of the adds.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

        That and the OS pushes adds on the desktop on boot of the display.

        Just wait until they push subtracts, then multiplies and divides. It'll be mathemagical.

    • Shock waves reverberate around the planet as Samsung claims it has better products than its competitors. This revolutionary marketing technique is sure to catch on with other companies and before long no one will admit they make second rate products publicly.

      Soon, they will need to manufacture their products in the USA, because of job creation and NIH. (Not invented here)

  • Not sure what they're talking about (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @05:29PM (#53606989) Homepage

    Just a week ago I visited the closest to my apartment mall and compared 2016 SUHD Quantum Dot Samsung TVs and LG's OLED TVs.

    And you know what? LG's blacks are just mind boggling, I mean the contrast ratio of LG's display was head and shoulders above what Samsung can manage.

    Maybe Samsung can claim and does have higher brightness (not sure if it's relevant since most people have their TVs at apartments/houses and usually watch them in the evening/at night) and a wider gamut, but when it comes to darkness/dim lights, OLEDs are miles better. I'd have deeper blacks over higher brightness/wider gamut any time, please.

    • Agreed. The LG OLEDs are stunning and the blacks are perfect - I'm just waiting to see how they age.

      As the AC says, it's all about the contrast ratio.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Two possibilities here:

      a) Samsung are talking out of their arse, and frankly they have to anyway because releasing a new model without bold claims would result in nasty things happening to a company's share price.
      b) Their TVs are actually good. After all they are talking about improvements over last year's model ... the very models you're comparing to the LG OLEDs.

      That said I am blown away by the OLED TVs. If I didn't have a perfectly good TV right now ....

    • Re:Not sure what they're talking about (Score:4, Funny)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @10:58PM (#53608287) Homepage

      I was at Best Buy last week; all of the TVs there looked awesome. I'm sure some of them looked slightly better than others, but really, who cares? At this point the quality of your viewing experience will be determined almost exclusively by the creative content of the programming you chose to watch, not by any limitations of the display technology. Adam Sandler movies will continue to suck no matter how large the contrast ratio gets.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        I was at Best Buy last week; all of the TVs there looked awesome. I'm sure some of them looked slightly better than others, but really, who cares? At this point the quality of your viewing experience will be determined almost exclusively by the creative content of the programming you chose to watch, not by any limitations of the display technology. Adam Sandler movies will continue to suck no matter how large the contrast ratio gets.

        And how your commute is will be more determined by where you live and where you work, but that's no reason to stop refining cars. A car from the 80s got you from A to B too, but we keep tweaking them and making them better. I want to look at a TV and wonder if I'm looking out a window. I want the blacks to be black. I want the bright whites to be bright white. I want all the colors to be there and to be just as clean and vibrant. The real world doesn't have color banding. The real world isn't fuzzy and does

    • >>And you know what? LG's blacks are just mind boggling,

      That's because showing black just means the pixel is off. I just purchased a LG OLED, and I'm constantly picking my jaw up off the floor. If a movie ever fades to black, it's like my TV is turned off. Crazy.

  • Lots of promises (Score:3)

    by Nikkos ( 544004 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @05:35PM (#53607025)

    Then they'll delay any fixes 'til forever, cancel and discontinue apps that were key features of the TV, etc, etc.

    I've got a JS9000 (2015), and I'm still waiting for them to update their HDR code - they've been promising the updated firmware since before the 2016 series came out. The latest promise was that the update would roll out in December - now we're in January and still nothing.

    Samsung was great 8 years ago, now they're just pumping out shiny new equipment with features that only partially work. They're the Korean Apple.

    • Apple generally make good hardware and good software experiences to go with it. We can argue about unwelcome changes, but I'd say most people generally accept Apple are good at hardware and software.

      Samsung, on the other hand are good at hardware (phones are a great example, as are TVs as it happens). Software though is awful. Look no further than the Android 'samsung push service', or the Samsung Games Hub, the Samsung Reading Hub, etc etc. All truly terrible apps, awful UX and whatever reason they were cr

  • If it doesn't have 0 latency on displaying the image I can't really use it the way I want... Game Mode on my Samsung TV still has around 24ms latency

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GNious ( 953874 )

      Don't worry, there'll never be a TV you can use then, if any latency is too much latency.

  • Seriously, TV display acronyms are getting out of hand.

    • What the heck are you talking about? Not a single TV acronym was used in the summary, only the actual names and acronyms of various generic display technologies.

  • Nope don't believe it.
    Its fundamental that a properly controlled light source (OLED) will necessarily give better results (especially contrast) than any kind of full-spectrum light source behind a controlled filter (LCD) ever could.

  • I'm going to nitpick here. While OLED screens look great there are a huge number of used phones out there with screen burn-in issues this is a problem LCD displays don't have nearly as good contrast ratios and black isn't really black.

    Not everyone can afford to buy the newest phone. So making sure that when the used price drops in a couple years 90% of what's available has angrybirds burned in to the screen does not help matters.

    This is great for people that can afford to buy new devices every two years but

  • Is there a colorimeter-based solution that one can actually put on the screen to measure a TV's output and verify any of these claims? E.g., with a "pro" color accurate monitor, you can calibrate it and the software measures and then confirms that the display is operating within the requested parameters. It sure seems that we are counting an awful lot on buzzwords from the marketing shills that these expensive TVs really are "better," but there's no way for the public to measure their performance to be sur

  • I can't wait to watch "The Housewives of Atlanta take on the Kardashians" in 100 percent color volume!

    • That's how TV develops. We watch less and less watchable programming on better and better systems, until we will have the most realistic experience of an experience we don't want to have.

  • What, then, of the LGBTQ-LED?

  • In other words (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @09:09PM (#53607993)

    You will see the compression artifacts, flickering and pixelation with more colors now. Awesome.

    Face it, no matter how great the TV, as long as networks compress the signals badly enough to make YouTube look like HD in comparison, it will still suck.

    • You will see the compression artifacts, flickering and pixelation with more colors now. Awesome.

      Face it, no matter how great the TV, as long as networks compress the signals badly enough to make YouTube look like HD in comparison, it will still suck.

      I signed up for DirecTV Now to take advantage of the AppleTV special offer and I can honestly say that the streams look amazingly clear. They have about the same quality as OTA broadcasts and is noticeably clearer than Comcast or U-Verse. The only problem is that the streams often pause even with gigabit Internet. This leads me to believe that they still have some technical issues on their end (though perhaps, since the gig ethernet is new in my neighborhood the issue is at my ISP).

  • Colors (Score:4, Informative)

    by TheSync ( 5291 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @09:31PM (#53608067) Journal

    The claim is "they can express all colors at any level of brightness".

    Currently every shipping consumer television (inorganic LED or OLED) can only display the DCI-P3 [wikipedia.org] color primaries, making the entire color gamut a triangle substantially smaller than "all colors".

    Newer sets are able to receive color information in a container based on ITU-R Rec. 2020 [wikipedia.org] color primaries, however no sets can actually display the colors outside of DCI-P3 but inside ITU-R Rec. 2020. Moreover, even the gamut of Rec. 2020 is not "all colors."

    To have a container for all colors with three primaries, you have to have color primaries that are not realizable, such as the CIE 1931 XYZ [wikipedia.org] space or the ACES [wikipedia.org] color space.

    However no one has yet invented a display system that can display colors that are not realizable, because they are not realizable.

    No system can display "all colors" additively, unless you use a system with color primaries based on all of the monochromatic colors (i.e. much more than three primaries - thousands). Four or five color primaries added together can get close. Allowing subtraction as well as addition of color primaries can help, but that is difficult to realize.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      The claim is "they can express all colors at any level of brightness".

      It doesn't mean what you think it means, if you have say a red, green and blue bulb then you can only do red at 1/3 intensity of white (R+G+B). Apparently this technology lets them shade all the lamps dynamically so you can have any displayable color at max intensity. It makes a huge difference for colors that are both strong and bright.

      Moreover, even the gamut of Rec. 2020 is not "all colors."

      It doesn't do all colors but it does do 99,8% of the colors you'll see reflecting off real world objects (Pointer's gamut). The only colors that are missing are those you'd

    • White.... all colors could mean white.

  • All I know is LCD and "LED" is awful. (Score:3)

    by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @10:15PM (#53608187) Journal

    I'm a CRT and Plasma man.

    I will not be upgrading my plasma until there's a superior option, it's as simple as that.
    OLED does sound good but burn in (like plasma, and yes, plasma does burn in, even the final models)

    I'm patient, she's still humming along ok, I think I'll get another 3 years out of my Panasonic 65".
    I want exceptional blacks, fantastic colour range, a non flickery display, movement that doesn't look weird. I want interpolation which can be disabled.
    Considering where the TV market has gone the past 12 months and game consoles, I pretty much 'demand' HDR as well as 4k.

    So, I'll wait, I'll wait a long time until they sort it all out.
    P.S all this "but this new LCD / LED trick makes them amazing!" yeah no. Just no. The blacks don't cut it in a dark room, not even close.

    • Once again stupidity triumphs. A Consumer Reports story noted that several employees were brought into a room with 15 televisions showing the same program and asked to choose their two favourite sets. Every employee chose the two plasma sets. I bet that would hold true if they brought in a hundred people.

      Plasma provides a better picture. It's exactly that simple.

    • I will not be upgrading my plasma until there's a superior option, it's as simple as that.

      If you believed that you would have thrown away both the CRTs and Plasmas a long time ago.

  • But we missed PLED [wikipedia.org] ! What happened to them ?!?

  • No release date or price, so this is just a fluff piece, really.

  • ...could you please give us better TV programs ?

  • Okay, I'm not even remotely knowledgable about such things, but whenever I see Star Trek-like technobabble like this, my woo alarms immediately start firing.

    Is this actually a thing, or most more marketing bullshit?

    • To answer my own question, apparently it's both. It is a new atomic-scale technology, but marketing still used a stupid term to describe it. (I consider "Quantum" to be a completely destroyed, nonsensical term, like "Cloud")

      from http://www.explainthatstuff.co... [explainthatstuff.com]

      "A quantum dot gets its name because it's a tiny speck of matter so small that it's effectively concentrated into a single point (in other words, it's zero-dimensional). As a result, the particles inside it that carry electricity (electrons and hol

  • I can't wait for 2018, the year of the RLED displays. or 2020, the year of the SLED displays. But what's going to be really amazing is not the TLED displays, but the XLEDs. Those XLEDs are going to be amazing!

    And the XXXLEDs? They'll fucking blow your socks off, among other things!

  • I have been observing experiments at SIGGRAPH several decades. Pixels resolution has gotten close to reality. Color systems like Samsungs are getting good. Six colors add some. What is really mindblowing is good dynamic range- capture bright light sources and deep shadows. A good HDR display starts to look like that desired window. Its not just the monitor. The full system requires a compatible camera and encoding protocol. The recently announced HDMI standard upgrade helps.

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