February 2025 ertonline.co.uk


Anthony Mackie and Yuki Kusumi. Inset: Steve Aoki performing


Panasonic CEO Yuki Kusumi outlined the


future of the iconic Japanese brand, with help from incoming Captain America actor Anthony Mackie. Panasonic, which has just returned to the North American TV market, is enthusiastically embracing sustainability and Artificial Intelligence, I was told. Mr Kusumi’s early morning keynote received a thumping jump start from superstar DJ and record producer, Steve Aoki. NVIDIA Founder and CEO, Jensen Huang,


also drew a huge crowd as he unveiled the astonishingly powerful GeForce RTX 50, and introduced Agentic AI, a real-time assistant, as well as a partnership with Toyota to develop next-gen autonomous vehicles using the NVIDIA DriveOS.


Delta Airlines even took over the Sphere for its keynote, pulling in 8,000 attendees. The immersive experience centred on the future of flight, and featured actress Viola Davis, Grammy award-winning musician Lenny Kravitz and football legend Tom Brady. Clearly the show has long stopped being purely a showcase for everyday electronics.


“CES continues to expand beyond the core of consumer electronics,” said Simon Forrest, Principal Technology Analyst at Futuresource. “The event covers automotive technologies and mobility providers, even personal aviation; so it could be argued that it’s losing identity and focus.” For Mr Forrest, the overarching theme for CES 2025 was definitively Artificial Intelligence. “All leading consumer electronics companies now have a strategy to integrate AI, even if it’s still a solution seeking a problem,” he told ERT, “and each is in a race to own the technology. Samsung’s theme is ‘AI for All’, and LG renamed


this ‘Affectionate Intelligence’ in an attempt to make it more relatable to consumers.” Personalisation was the most obvious manifestation of AI across the show floor, he reflected, but a killer app has yet to materialise. “Undoubtedly, the costs of implementing AI are now starting to decrease, but there’s still a long way to go towards fully commercialising it.” Mr Forrest said Futuresource still considers most of AI simply a “better algorithm” driving software and services, rather than anything approaching skilled intelligence. From my perspective, the biggest surprise of CES 2025 was the revelation that LG Display had retired its well-received MLA (Micro Lens Array) OLED panel, as used by Panasonic and Philips for 2024 models, in favour of an entirely new technology, called Primary RGB Tandem OLED.


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This fourth-generation OLED panel technology claims to be 33 per cent brighter than the previous MLA generation, and better optimised for AI-powered antics. The new panel is able to hit an HDR peak of 4,000 nits, considerably more than we’ve seen from OLED before, which makes for very pronounced specular highlights, as well as an average picture brightness that serves OLED well in rooms with high ambient brightness. The design uses four independent stacks of RGB elements to produce light. Previously, panels used a three-stack configuration, with two layers of blue emitting relatively short energy wavelengths alongside red, green, and yellow elements, in a single layer. The new Tandem structure (pictured below) organises the light source into four stacks by adding two layers of blue elements plus independent layers of red and green elements. This evidently improves maximum brightness. By separating the red, green, and blue elements into distinct layers, colour purity is also enhanced. LG will use the new panel tech in its upcoming G5 OLED model.


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The With the latest Alpha 11 AI processor Gen2


processor and Primary RGB Tandem panel, dubbed Brightness Booster Ultimate, it’s very much the flagship for the brand. The set boasts a host of AI-powered picture modes, as well as Filmmaker Mode with Ambient Light Compensation, able to detect ambient lighting conditions and adjust the picture settings without sacrificing the filmmaker’s original intent. >>


Left: NVIDIA Founder and CEO, Jensen Huang


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