News JVTech TV OLED: A terrible duel between LG and Samsung is coming in 2024, the CES announcements prove it
Published on September 1, 2024 at 5:37 p.m
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For three years the world of OLED televisions has been rocked by the war between two manufacturers, two Korean giants: LG and Samsung. CES 2024 is underway and we have a lot of information about the upcoming best 4K TVs on the market.
In the thumbnail you will find the Samsung S95D on the left and the LG M4 on the right
CES 2024 starts hostilities on OLED TV series
CES 2024 in Las Vegas is now
The CES is the largest high-tech trade fair in the world. It takes place in Las Vegas every year in early January. The opportunity for the world's largest manufacturers to showcase their products to the public and technology professionals. We therefore see a series of screens, one more impressive than the other. Even though Micro-LED, the best display technology, is still massively present in Vegas because of its wow factor, it's not what we're interested in today. For what ? Because a micro LED screen still costs around €1000… per inch. Yes yes, you read that right, The large micro-LED panels proudly displayed cost around 100,000 euros. Apart from a few footballers and other millionaires, nobody buys it. No, what interests us most are the OLED announcements.
What is OLED?
Before we get into it, let's go back to the basics: What is OLED? This is a display technology, a kind of screen if you will. Schematically, we could divide display technologies into two large groups: LCD screens on the one hand and OLED screens on the other. A classic LCD screen, by far the most common on the market, is made up of a multitude of layers. At its base we find a backlight panel made up of small white light-emitting diodes. At the top of this panel, color filters are placed, the aim of which is to restore the image to be displayed. The great thing about OLED is that there is no backlight. An OLED panel is made up of so-called “self-emitting” (which individually emit their own light) or “organic” pixels. This has several very direct consequences that are very easy to see even for an untrained eye:
- OLED displays consist of fewer “layers”, so there are many more purposes (and more flexible, hence the appearance of foldable smartphones, for example) than LCD screens;
- Display on OLED screens perfect blacks. This is then referred to as “infinite” contrast, as a black pixel is simply erased.
- OLED screens offer several advantages such as excellent viewing angles, ultra-fast response time or even the elimination of blooming in the brightest areas of the image (for example, have you ever noticed a kind of halo effect around your subtitles?).
In short, OLED is stunning. Even today, the classic OLED and its QD-OLED variant continue to improve year after year, and 4K TVs that use this technology are considered by all experts in the world to be the best in the consumer market. .
The legendary rivalry between the Koreans from LG and Samsung
Around ten years ago, the Korean manufacturer LG relied heavily on the then emerging OLED technology. It should be noted that it was a risky bet at the time. Large OLED panels were very expensive to produce (even more expensive than today) and offered no guarantee of results. OLED screens had, among other things, major problems with marking and brightness.
Luckily for LG, their bet paid off. For years, LG Display's factories were the only ones in the world capable of producing TV-sized OLED. When the technology matured and other manufacturers like Sony, Panasonic or Philips got involved, everyone had to buy their panels from LG.
Samsung, on the other hand, has been avoiding OLED for a long time. The problem is that Samsung is the world leader in the television market and it is out of the question for the company to leave a direct competitor in a near-monopolistic situation in such a promising market. While OLED has fixed its marking and brightness issues in 2022, Samsung display factories have started producing their own OLED version, QD-OLED. It was a success, the QD-OLED panels are excellent.
Since 2022, there has been a battle every year to see who, LG or Samsung, can produce the best OLED panels. Last year, LG won in top light, but QD-OLED panels were considered better in terms of fine details and colors. We can't wait to see the innovations of 2024!
LG is relying on its processor and AI for this year's 4K OLED series
I have already spoken to you in detail about all LG 4K OLED TV ranges for 2024. This long paper can be found here. Here we summarize most of the innovations that the brand, still a leader in the OLED market, has offered this year.
At the top, where the war with Samsung is taking place, we note 2 big changes :
- The screen frequency ranges from 120 to 144 Hz and earn G-Sync certification. Great news for PC gamers who connect their device to their TV.
- A new supercharged chip is coming. This processor, called Alpha 11, will be four times more powerful than last year's, especially when it comes to managing the TV's AI. This AI is constantly used to improve the final representation of what is displayed on the screen, whether it is upscaling a Full HD image to 4K or refining the details of each scene. For example, AI will be able to understand the atmosphere of a scene and easily adjust the colorimetry shot by shot to best suit the director's intentions. Nice surprise: DRM-protected content is also processed! The Alpha 11 has 2.5 GB of RAM, which is huge for a TV. Alpha 11 also allows for sound improvements: remastering of voices to make them more audible in action scenes, virtualization in 11.1.2 for well-equipped people, etc.
In short: after focusing on brightness in 2023, LG is now working on image processing thanks to a powerful processor.
Samsung is once again developing QD-OLED further
Samsung sees sales in 2022 and 2023 as encouraging. In 2024, the Seoul giant therefore wants to step on the gas when it comes to OLED, especially by launching more ranges than last year to cover more needs (and teaming up with LG to compete with them everywhere).
At the very highest end, Samsung announces 4 major new features:
- New Brightness gain at the top.
- Arrival from 144Hz…like LG.
- Processor improvement. We have less information about Samsung processors than LG processors.
- And above all, the arrival of one new crazy anti-reflection filter called “OLED Glare Free”. Anyone who saw it in action at CES was speechless: even in bright light, the image barely moves.
We're really looking forward to testing the M3, LG's elite device, and the S95D, Samsung's elite device. Will one of the two Korean manufacturers be able to overtake the other in 2024? The answer when the products come onto the market in the spring.