There was much talk of the impact of artificial intelligence on everything from washing machines to ovens, but it was a QLED 8K TV which was the only standout new product to be unveiled. “Open your mind to innovation” was the order from the stage at the Samsung press conference in Berlin.
As ever, we heard big claims about the amazing new experience this television would deliver – “perfect reality” is the slogan Samsung used to describe the picture quality. Yes, you get four times as many pixels as with a 4K set, 16 times the resolution of HD. But Samsung is also promising a much brighter picture.
The new 85” TV’s (you heard that right, 85 inches of television), will boast 4,000 nits. What’s a nit? Well, one nit represents the amount of light a 19th Century whale oil candle would have emitted, and apparently they are used to measure the brightness of a TV picture. You learn something new every day. “It’s the beginning of a revolution for depth and detail in content,” says Guy Kinnell, Samsung’s vice-president for TV.
And the new 8K’s will also utilize the latest and greatest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. “It’s the addition of artificial intelligence to our upscaling mechanism which generates pictures that are always in 8K, whether it’s a source that’s in 4K or full HD,” he said. A demo on the Samsung showed scratchy old footage of a news broadcast being “upscaled” so that you could now detect a mole on the newsreader’s cheek. Yikes.
LG has also developed its own version of an 8K TV, with an 88” screen they called OLED TV, but they don’t have any current plans to put it on the market, because there isn’t any 8K content available. LG’s Communications Chief Ken Hong stated that the company needs to assess “whether or not it makes business sense at the moment.” However, Samsung is gambling that the promise of “upscaling” will persuade people to buy its 8K sets in the fall – no doubt at a premium 8K price.
Outside of the hardcore tech fanatics with a ton of extra spending income, it’s hard to see many remodeling their living rooms to make way for an 88” TV that lets you see people’s moles up close and personal.
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