Another CES has come and gone. We’ve mercifully escaped the horrendous hellscape of everything being integrated to blockchain and NFT’s; to enter the horrendous and slightly scarier hellscape of everything being plugged into, coded for, or rebranded to make it seem like it has “AI” in it, whatever that means to the developer. There’s plenty of articles on it and I’m sure you’ve seen quite a lot of them. However, the most interesting thing for me in this particular CES was something that made me have an unfortunate realization and begrudging admission.
At least in the medium term, MicroLED is not going to make it.
I love MicroLED in principle. It’s very difficult to not love it. The idea of having all of the advantages of OLED without the concern that this is the day that your screen cuts its brightness again to prevent image retention or just plain discover that the claims of durability did not apply to your specific use case is extremely tempting. And for all of the improvements to add additional dimming zones, it’ll never beat every single pixel being its own dimming zone.
But at CES, the trade show designed to showcase the latest and greatest and damn the practicality; a show which is the primo spot to discover the most absurd displays known to man, they have once again taken a backseat to OLED in all of its interpretations. That’s not to say that there weren’t any MicroLED displays. Samsung, who unsurprisingly is taking the “Let’s throw all the R&D o the wall and see what sticks” got a lot of coverage out of their transparent MicroLED and, of course, The Wall is always there to rep for MicroLED. The one beacon of hope for normal consumers living on planet earth was their 76" model, which has scaled down the technology to the point it can fit on a living room, if not on most people’s budgets. Nevertheless, most of the coverage was focused on the latest generation of QD-OLED panels. For PC users, that was mostly focused on Samsung’s new 32" QD-OLED panel, which was then fitted to several OEM designs. All of them gorgeous and having me wonder if I could live with a HUD perpetually baked into my primary display. Some of them also have AI because of course they do.
Mini LED also had a good year with an assortment of giant TV’s with ludicrously high peak brightnesses and enough dimming zones to where most of the bloom you’ll see is a natural feature of your eyes. I guess at this point MicroLED becomes less of a game changer. At least that’s what Acer seems to be banking on with their $2500, 2304 dimming zones Z57 ultrawide. I’m sure a couple dozen YouTubers will get me all of the data I could want for it when it releases in a couple of months.
Back when I first saw MicroLED, I thought it would be until this or next year where it would be all the rage and seen in big box electronics stores sold by clueless sales assistants who would mostly praise its size and nevermind the price tag. Much like the Battery that doesn’t lose charge capacity or the return of supersonic air travel, it didn’t quite work out that way. But I hope that at least, unlike the other 2, rep’s confidence that the delay is actually getting shorter are not just PR-Rep optimism
And I guess QDEL was also there but that one will need some Best-Buy TV-Like demos before it can get headlines proclaiming it as the next big thing.
