Samsung fires $70m at quantum televisions Samsung's beefing up one of the divisions that hasn't been burned by its Galaxy Note 7 disaster, acquiring a US company that specialises in quantum dots for displays. Under its previous name Color IQ, the takeover target QD Vision was already licensing technology to TV makers like Philips, LG, Sony, and TCL Group in China. “ …
Can anybody shed some light on the "behaviours managed at the quantum level" bit? Kinda sounds like a contradiction in terms. Or paraphrasing a very optimistic press release. Interesting, though.
PSA: Do not expect better television programmes just because the television sets get better technology.
It's a misnomer here. Colours have long been achieved by doping one material with another. A few years ago boffins discovered some materials that could affect colours simply due to their size (based on the research into butterfly wings, I believer). To get this to work you need really tiny particles, which is where the term nano or quantum come from. The managing is all about managing these particles.
So rather than combining RBG to get beige, the quantum dot just emits beige?
Not quite. Due to the use of filters LCD screens have a narrower range of colours or gamut than OLED. Doping the crystals with the nano particles helps increase that range. The difference is that colours used to be tied to particular chemicals: say Lead oxide for white, rust for ochre. Now you just choose nano particles of the right size for the colours you want. I'm not au fait with the details but I think they use the quantum dots to create sub pixels and thus increase the range of colours, because the "white" of the source isn't a continuous spectrum.
Not exactly, beige light would be rather bad idea (the source limits the color space). Flatscreen TV's evolved from LCDs to LED (basically an LCD) to QLED (another minor change). What's kept changing (besides resolution, price and marketing gimmicks) is how backlight was managed. Originally CFL was the source. This has been replaced LED (hence "LED TV"). White (approximately) source on the edge of the screen (or zones in fancy TVs) shines/spreads through the light-guide > LCD > color filter. The whiter the light (and the better the RGB filter up front), the better the color reproduction (especially if the video content can deliver). Use of quantum dots addresses the white balance (easier to distribute mix of correct size dots than to make uniformly white bright LED source) and power efficiency (LED source operates at its max efficiency/color while dots take care of turning that light white). Likely the RGB filter itself can be replaced with strips of uniformly sized dots (for each of primary color) increasing power efficiency even more and bringing complexity closer to OLEDs (while maintaining price, lifespan and power use advantage). Not sure of any impact on black levels vs OLED. Maybe quantum dots can be incorporated into OLED as - surprisingly so - color space is not their strength (but the picture is striking enough to forgive slight bias). QDs are source of really narrow/pure color light which is great for mixing 3 pf these into full range color space TV needed.
Anyway, QDs are not just for TV. Projectors, lights (including automotive headlights) and possible some applications outside lighting.
One of the advantages of QDs is that they emit "purer" R G or B than current LCD solutions. Purer colours appear brighter - and that's on top of the far lower loss through the panel because white light isn't being filtered down to a single colour then those colours recombined in the eye (A "white" screen is usually less than half the brightness of the backlight behind it.)
One of the disadvantages is that no two people perceive R G B in quite the same way, with the response curve for each colour in the eye being slightly different from person to person.
This means that perfect colour space representation for one person can seem "off" for someone else and tetramats are likely to get headaches.
As for OLEDS, there's a simple reason they're not being sold in the larger sizes - yields are too low - where the same area of a screen with a couple of defects that would get written off for a single TV would make a dozen phone screens with no defects at all. This is the same chicken-egg problem that existed to keep large scale LCDs off the mass market until production quality was nailed and then we had a flood of the things.
I'd argue you're possibly wrong.
Remember when if you wanted quality programming with top actors you had to watch a film? Now all the money is in TV ( which is great for me as I've always preferred series to films ). Kevin Spacey in an internet only TV programme, for example. Imagine that 15 years ago. TV was for no name actors and has beens for the most part.
I do wonder whether that sort of thing is at least partly down to how good home TV's are now. I don't think the internet is much of a driver, as there are non-netflix massive budget programmes too ( game of thrones, etc ).
In the longer term, its boosters hope quantum dots could replace other light sources in displays, making them a potential competitor to OLEDs.
Not really: OLED has fewer components and layers and can in theory work entirely without glass. However, Samsung, despite having invested heavily in the OLED production process, have decided that for TVs they're more competitive if they tweak LCDs and sell more expensive OLED screens with higher margin phones until they or 3M, or Dupont get the additive manufacturing for OLED sorted.
What happens if you watch cat videos on a quantum "box"? Millions of observed kittens spontaneously popping their clogs?
I prefer to think in terms of Terry Pratchetts observations on boxed cats, theoretical or otherwise, alive, dead or bloody furious - possibly the latter as they are not seeing any royalties...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
