REVIEW
Television jumps the shark at CES 2025
elevision jumps the shark at CES 2025
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With screen sizes edging past 100-inches, will buyers be bemused by the latest big screen behemoths? Steve May reports from Las Vegas on the top AV trends from the world’s biggest tech show
W
alking the halls of this year’s CES tech fest in Las Vegas, I was both awed and baffled by the number of TV displays that exceeded 100 inches. These
high brightness monsters made my resident 65-incher look like a portable, as they loomed from booths in the Central Hall.
Both Hisense and TCL seemed locked in a battle of big screen brinkmanship. Hisense looked best prepared for prime time, impressing with its 116-inch TriChroma 116UX, a Mini LED model that uses innovative RGB Local Dimming to produce extremely bright, rich images. The set employs tens of thousands of RGB Local Dimming optical lenses, each with red, blue and green LEDs. The trick is they can be controlled either at chip level, or as part of a cluster. This massive set also comes with a 6.2.2 Dolby Atmos sound system, with AI Sound Optimisation to tailor audio to match the content, but it’s still surprisingly slim, at just 40mm thick. That said, I reckon tomorrow’s buyer is still going to struggle installing this beast!
Still not big enough for you? Hisense also presented the 136MX, the brand’s first consumer facing MicroLED display. With no need for a backlight, this 136-inch self-emissive prototype offered quite astonishing levels of luminance and colour richness.
The brand says the display comprises more than 24.88 million microscopic LEDs, and every pixel is its own light source. The result was a formidable canvas of dynamic contrast, inky blacks, and blistering detail. Hisense quotes peak brightness at a staggering 10,000 nits. However, the sheer logistics of stocking, selling and installing such screens made my head spin. Perhaps for US buyers with traditionally more domestic real estate to fill, they’re an entirely practical proposition. The rest of us might find them less so… Will 2025 go down as the year television technology finally jumped the shark? Ted Romanowitz, Head of Displays at Futuresource, predicts that the demand for LCD and OLED screens 70 inches and larger is likely to rise 20 per cent globally by 2028.
“The adoption of larger format screens seems to shift up 10 inches diagonal per decade,” he told ERT. For example, North Americans who purchased a 60-inch screen in 2010 are now looking at a 70-inch model. “I’m mindful that homes in this region are typically large to accommodate larger format displays, hence the differences regionally with EMEA and APAC. Average selling prices are a key deciding factor; in the USA, $2,000 and below is a sweet spot to drive broader adoption. 77-inch OLED televisions have now dipped below that price threshold and demand is ramping.” Of the super-sized screens at CES, Mr Romanowitz pointed out that Samsung and LG showcased MicroLED Chip on Glass (CoG) televisions at CES, while the Hisense and TCL variants were really Mini LED Chip on Board (CoB), but with $150,000-$300,000 list prices, “the market will be relegated to high income/net worth individuals in larger executive homes globally via the CEDIA and Professional AV sales channels.”
Busy chaos
The vibe at this year’s show was one of busy chaos, with the Central Hall at the LVCC midway through an extensive building renovation. More than 141,000 attendees from around the globe navigated its temporary walkways, up 4.4 per cent on 2024 numbers. There was definitely a positive buzz in the air. The keynotes were packed out.
Below: Hisense 116UX and TCL MicroLED
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