Home Entertainment ANALYSIS: TV
24 LG’s G4 TV Bright future ahead as
TV makers tune into AI Mini LED is closing the gap on OLED, but where’s the smart money going this year, wonders Steve May?
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024 is shaping up to be the year that Mini LED usurps OLED as the hottest TV tech on the high street. OLED has long been the choice of home cinema enthusiasts and high- end buyers, but some big names appear keen to move Mini LED into the spotlight. Sony is being particularly bullish about its next generation of Mini LED screens, after revealing a new backlight
technology
which improves HDR performance to a point that exceeds OLED in peak brightness, yet maintains OLED-style black level performance. The brand previewed its new panel driver tech in Tokyo late last year, and invited ERT along for an early look. Having spent some time with the engineers, we think they could well be on to something… Toshiyuku Ogura, Sony Distinguished Engineer,
declared that Mini LED “has greater potential when it comes to colour volume, brightness, and viewing angle,” than rival technologies.
Sony has identified three key elements for backlight improvement: the picture processor, the LED driver, and the LED itself. Improving backlight precision and brightness, brings dramatic improvements in dynamic range and picture control.
The move follows a concerted effort by Sony, which has deep inroads into the movie-making community, to make more of HDR when it comes to mastering content for the home. Even with a widely observed cap of 1,000 nits for broadcast content, many creatives are grading far lower than that.
Sony Mini LED
Sony demonstrated the precision its new panel IC offers with custom Mini LED screens that had half their LCD layer removed, so we could better see the pulsating backlight in action. It says much for the precision of this backlight that we could still clearly make out the image. Early samples look impressive. Peak HDR brightness in excess of 2,000 nits is certainly on the cards. Sony compared this next gen backlight technology against last year’s models, and the new prototype panel clearly outperformed them when it came to absolute brightness. And the brand has other developments planned, although these may take longer to come to fruition. It says it wants to make TV picture presets more intelligent, to the point where they can even offer bespoke picture adjustments tailored to individual movies. An evolution of FilmMaker Mode and Sony’s BRAVIA Core Creator Calibrated mode, this would be a significant advance on the current genre-based presets consumers are familiar with today, it says.
AI in TV
Samsung is also going big with Mini LED in 2024, introducing Neo QLED TVs (pictured below) powered by AI enhanced processing. At its World of Samsung showcase, held recently in Frankfurt, the brand left no doubt about the significance of AI when it comes to TV. Particularly eye-opening was a demonstration of generative upscaling. This, along with powerful neural network picture processing, is expected to resolve the (lack of) content issue which has plagued 8K TV sales for years. Using generative AI, old techniques to upscale images are being abandoned. Instead, AI can effectively reimagine images to full 8K resolution, with hyper dense realism. To prove the point, it showed 720p material ‘reinterpreted’
to 8K resolution. From a
standard viewing distance, it was difficult to identify the native resolution of the content.
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