Samsung at CES: 세로, Nextgen TV, no more bezels and 49 inches for gamers

Reader dietmargru wrote the following comment in the comments column of the News Feed of CES 2020:

Samsung opens the official part of the world's largest electronics fair with a press conference on this very topic. The Visual Displays press conference is not just about hardware, because that's not what CES is all about. "It's new, you can buy it" is not the reason for the CES. The trade fair in Las Vegas is more about trends and the future of technology, as well as new technology standards that will make up said future.

At Samsung, it's called Nextgen TV, actually NEXTGEN TV, but nobody can read that if I go through with it.

The solution to the 8K problem?

In the recent past, Samsung has released several TVs that can display content with a resolution of up to 8K, i.e. 7680 × 4320 pixels. Cool. Actually. Because there is a small problem: 8K is not acceptable due to bandwidth. A normal streaming infrastructure and a standard internet connection for the average Swiss person will hardly be able to stably play 8K content without the image juddering. AI upscaling is nice, but the format should be fully utilised at some point, right? Editor Luca Fontana has broken down the whole calculation on this topic in detail.

Nextgen TV is supposed to solve this. In marketing terms, the technology describes the adaptation of the ATSC 3.0 standard. This standard, developed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), is 52 pages long in detail. In a nutshell, the aim is to generate more picture with less load on the bandwidth and help from other systems in the television. Just like the new audio system, which is supposed to convert non-three-dimensional films into 3D sound, this all still sounds very abstract and as if it's too good to be true. But if this is all true, then Samsung has really shaken up the television market.

Speaking of mixing it up: There's The Sero.

The Sero that spins

The big star of the show, however, is not the Q950TS, which can do even more 8K but is only 15 millimetres thick. Nor is the star 95 inches diagonally. The star of the show is called The Sero. The Sero is actually called 세로. The word translates as "vertical", but depending on the phonetic spelling, it may be "Selo" instead of "Sero". The Sero is 43 inches diagonal and can do one thing in particular: it rotates.

The use case looks like this: You connect your mobile to the TV. Whether the mobile phone has to be from Samsung or whether any phone can address the function is still unknown. But I think I've seen someone connect their iPhone X - or a later model - to the device. The Sero has access to the phone's gyro sensor. When Sero detects that a video content is being displayed in portrait mode, it rotates and turns from a landscape device to a portrait one.

Whether it's Instagram stories or YouTube videos that were recorded in portrait format, the Sero displays them without black bars. Which makes the target group clear. Millennials who, for once, are not to blame for the downfall of our society because they eat avocado toast.

As banal as the spin sounds, the Sero seems clever, even if the demonstration on stage and in the demo area doesn't quite work. Well, I also think that people like me trying to connect to the Sero to show their content doesn't help. Sometimes I should just wait a moment. Or not, because the Sero is fun.

The fact that The Frame is now also available in 75, 50 and 32 inch screen sizes and the Serif in 43, 49 and 55 inch sizes is of little interest.

Bigger for gamers

Samsung is one of the last major screen manufacturers not to rely on OLED. People like black levels. In OLED screens, this is achieved by not illuminating a pixel that should be black in the picture. Experts find Samsung's decision not to opt for OLED somewhat strange. Even stranger is the fact that Samsung uses OLED technology in its mobile phones and does it so well that its screens have been among the best on the market for two years.

Samsung's decision not to use OLED is even stranger.

Instead, Samsung is focussing on QLED. The technology is not fundamentally different from LED displays, no matter what Samsung would have us believe. As LEDs struggle with the purity of colours - especially the blue tint - Samsung uses nanoparticles to correct this. The result is a decent picture that just doesn't achieve the darkest black.

Gamers will now be able to enjoy QLED technology in the form of the new Samsung Odyssey G9. With a screen diagonal of 49 inches, the screens are curved. However, the curvature of the display is new: 1000R is a curvature that, according to Samsung, has never been seen before. In addition, there is a response time of one millisecond and a series of features designed to reduce stress for the gamer's eye. The 240Hz refresh rate is displayed in an aspect ratio of 32:9.

In addition to the flagship, there are also the G7 models. Although they are not as impressive as a 49-inch monster, the G7 screens with 32 and 27-inch screen diagonals still make quite an impression. Essentially, they are only smaller than the G9, but have most of the same features.

G9 and G7 are Nvidia G-Sync compatible and support AMD Freesync 2. And even if it's completely pointless to make the back of a screen look pretty, but when a company goes to such lengths as Samsung, it really makes a difference.

Borders? Who needs bezels anyway?

Then there's the big flagship from Samsung: the Q950TS 8K QLED TV. The most impressive thing about this TV is lost in this jumble of abbreviations. The Q950TS has virtually no edges. That's because 99 per cent of the front is screen. The frame around the screen is almost non-existent.

The fact that the 95-inch screen delivers a resolution of 8K is no longer surprising. There is also new AI upscaling and a series of new features that allow deeper integration into the Samsung ecosystem, among other things. During the press conference, I receive a message from Zurich. Luca Fontana is still awake. It's well past midnight. But he doesn't miss the press conference. Why? He doesn't know either, but as a TV editor it's probably part of the job.

"Does it have full area local dimming?"

Samsung doesn't have the answer. Because the integration and AI and all that takes over. The press conference ripples along. At the end, the verdict from Zurich:

"The Q950TS stands and falls with Full Area Local Dimming. Because the Samsung Frame can also look chic, cost a lot and not deliver the best picture." <p