Ah CES. The place where egregious marketing and shilling joins with genuinely interesting technology to make even the most embittered tech enthusiast find something of interest. Me? I’m happy to see more lightweight powerhouse laptops and the odd, quirky products that always make an appearance and would be really annoying if exposed to an actual productivity environment.
But the technology I wanted is still not quite ready for that. MicroLED displays.
Second only to E-ink on the list of display technologies that get me excited for the future of technology. OLED blends the excellent viewing angles of an IPS and the perfect blacks that can only come from a display that can switch off bits of itself with instant response times. There are only a couple of issues.
That burn-in is killer, literally for the screen. And despite marked improvements over the years regarding longevity, the Organic bit of OLED means that it’s just a slowdown on the inevitable path to unusable dimming or image retention. Linus from LTT discovered this much to his chagrin when he decided to use the LG C2 as his office monitor. Not that that has stopped him from continuing to recommend OLEDs for these applications.
MicroLED removes this problem entirety, and because every pixel is their own illumination source like on an OLED, you have whatever number of pixels you have as your number of dimming zones. The lack of organic components in it also means that it will continue to do this for long after you’ve forgotten how much that wall of pixels costs.
Price is not the only issue. Yields for MicroLEDs are still a couple notches below “good enough for mass distribution”, not to mention the pixels are still rather too large for a standard consumer display. It has gotten better. Only a couple of years ago it was exclusively the purview of jumbotron-class displays. Now, not so much.
Still, with a long development road ahead of it and things other than screen resolution becoming a point of interest for the consumers, it’s understandable that they will also keep making better OLEDs. QD-OLED and the like are making screens better than ever. And as always, that $5000 TV from five years ago is now your $500 or so TV. Readily available at the big box store.
On that particular race, MicroLED is still at the “Requires a team of professionals to be installed at home” stage. Which means that them appearing in your living room or your pocket is still rather some time away, no matter what the people who make a living out of Apple rumors will tell you. But when it does come, it means that yes, you can enjoy that nice picture quality, vibrant colors and perfect blacks for about as long as you could on nan’s old CRT.
Of course, unlike that one, if you want the full experience you may have to buy a soundbar.
