You know how OLED panels make LCD monitors look like slugs when it comes to response times? Well, maybe you want to sit down. Because Samsung’s new microLED TV is 500,000 times faster than its latest OLED panels.
Specifically, Samsung says it’s new MicroLED CX (opens in new tab) panels, just announced at CES, are good for response times of 2 nanoseconds. That is comparable to the pixel response of 0.1 ms Dell Alienware 34 OLED (opens in new tab) has been reviewed on, which of course uses a Samsung Quantum Dot OLED panel.
If nanosecond sounds like the natural progression from millisecond, it’s worth remembering just how big the gap is between the two metrics. Milliseconds are, of course, one thousandth of a second. Nanoseconds? That’s one billionth of a second. All this means that this Samsung micoLED panel is five million times faster than a 1ms LCD monitor.
The pixels of the new Samsung microLED CX respond in two billionths of a second. That is, by all accounts, instantaneous. As far as the pixel response is concerned, it’s endgame. Job done. Any further improvements will be irrelevant. You would never feel them.
Further specs are a bit thin for now, but we assume the sets will all be 4K, which is the norm for microLED TVs so far. Samsung has said the refresh rate is set at 240Hz and the screen-to-body ratio reaches an impressive 99.9%. In other words, these TVs have virtually no bezels at all.
Of course, microLED has long been promising, but still painfully expensive screen technology. As in $50,000, $100,000, that kind of pricey. Size has also been an issue, with microLED screens usually exceeding 100 inches.
Samsung says the new CX line will be the cheapest microLED sets to date and that’s no doubt true. But given the existing microLED prices, there’s plenty of room for the cheapest yet, but still off the charts compared to conventional displays. Size seems to have cracked Samsung, though, with panel options starting later this year starting at just 50-inches.
That’s still a bit excessive for a PC monitor, but the progression is clear enough. Little by little, microLED is marching towards the size and price point that would make it viable for a PC monitor.
It seems very likely that microLED will eventually become the technology of choice for PC monitors, at least for 2D flat panel displays. They have all the benefits of OLED, including lighting per pixel, but even better response times and no burn-in concerns.
It is only the prices and proportions that need to be determined and Samsung is at least moving in the right direction. With OLED finally making the leap into the desktop as of late, it’ll be interesting to see if it can replace LCD as the standard panel technology for PC monitors or if microLED can close the cost gap fast enough to make OLED obsolete before it’s even but a chance to become well established. Watch this space.