- Samsung Display reveals modular OLED wall mounted screen
- The most important technical change is 60% reduction in the frame of OLED screens
- It looks very similar
Samsung Display has revealed a new modular OLED screen concept where a screen of a certain size or shape can be built using a number of smaller OLED screens that are tiled together (via Tom’s Guide).
If the idea sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a very similar idea like Samsung’s The Wall Micro-LED screen-but this is the first time we’ve seen the idea inflicted on OLED.
The most important technological change that has made this possible is that Samsung says it can reduce the framework needed on OLED and QD-OLED panels by 40%, bringing them down to 0.6 mm. Now, every Panel has that frame, so in fact there is a 1.2 mm boundary between the screens, which will be enough of a black line to become noticeable, which is probably part of why this remains a concept for now.
But let’s assume that Samsung can continue to improve the technique and can make the frame even smaller, in which case I think it makes this technique extremely interesting to create giant projector-matching OLED TV screens. But I am not necessarily interested in the square modular concept shown above – the same technique could be used in other similar ways.
I immediately began to think about how the prices of the best OLED TVs increase exponentially as the sets get bigger due to certain quirks of OLED production and how combining smaller screens could make them much more cost -effective.
Four 55-inch TVs in a Trenchcoat
To illustrate what I mean, I will use LG’s OLED -TV rather than Samsungs because of the sizes involved. The LG G5 (company’s flagship) serves a 97-inch model and it costs $ 24,999 / £ 24,999.
It is literally 10 times the price of the 55-inch LG G5 model that costs $ 2,499 / £ 2,399. And the 97-inch model actually has a subordinate panel-it is a few generations behind and will not be near as light as the 55-inch model’s primary RGB Tandem Four-Stack panel.
The reason for this is that it is incredibly difficult to manufacture large OLED TV panels in a cost-effective way. OLED screens are produced on huge sheets called ‘mother glass’, which is then cut down to smaller sizes; So you can produce almost four times as many 55-inch screens per day. Mother-glass plate that you can 97-inch screens.
But also OLED production still has yield problems, which means that a lot of screens are produced imperfect and this waste is incorporated into the cost of screens. If you produce a lot Of panels per Mother glass (if, for example, you make phone screens), waste doesn’t mean anything too much – losing a panel waste of a small amount of your material and time.
However, if you make 97-inch panels and there is a problem, you have lost a huge amount of material and time and these costs are incorporated into the pricing of the good panels effectively.
So the modular concept is immediately interesting because it solves this problem: combines smaller screens in a larger display and reduces the waste problem massively.
So what I’m thinking is this: If the framework can be further reduced, could we have a 110-inch OLED TV in the future that are actually four 55-inch TVs combined in a device? It is even greater than the 97-inch model, and could still cost a (relatively) only $ 10,000, based on the price of four 55-inch LG G5 TVs.
And I have used LG as my example because of the comparison of easy size with existing TVs, but this new technique comes from Samsung to potentially use in its QD-OLED TVs and it’s even better, Because these panels do not go any bigger than 77 inches at the moment, so it would allow it to offer a giant OLED for the first time.
It’s not as simple as all that, of course. Combining four 4K OLED panels means we are talking about an 8K -TV, although Samsung has plenty of experience with 8K treatment.
And in addition, a lot of purists – ie. The people who most likely want this TV – reject any sign of a nail between the panels, so unless the frames can be removed completely, I probably talk about something of a pipe dream.
But it wouldn’t be the first time a secret setup of double screen has been used to make advanced tech more realistically priced-the first 5K screen on an Apple iMac was literally two 1280 x 1440 screens driven by a custom display processor to treat them like a device without any nail down the middle.
Obviously, building a TV out of small squares also solves the screen size problem, but there is a simplicity to solve four 4K TVs together that solve problems such as dealing with a non-standard resolution.
I don’t think we’ll see a 110-inch OLED, built this way, competing with the best TVs soon-but if this frame-reducing tech continues to improve, it may enable the home theater screen in your dreams, especially with the micro-nest that doesn’t seem to be affordable in the near future.
