Samsung’s Micro LED “Wall” Will Be At Infocomm

February 27, 2018 by Dave Haynes

The interesting thing about sitting in on the Samsung “Resolution” road tour the display company is doing around the US is listening in on what the company is relaying to partners.

First – expectations for growth in the outdoor display market are huge. The company did about $100 million in outdoor display sales in 2017, and are forecasting about 15X that for 2018 – driven by the QSR drive-thru market and digital OOH street furniture displays.

It owes to a combination of things. Prices are coming down. R&D has matured to a point that outdoor is no longer a dark art. Samsung is marketing what amounts to a plug’n’play, outdoor-ready high-bright for enclosure companies. And the fast food and OOH industries are in mass adoption mode, notably the biggest one – who will likely influence what the other guys do.

This may explain, in part, why STRATACACHE has opened an outdoor display assembly line – albeit using LG displays – that’s roughly the size of Belgium.

Second, I knew OLED was expensive and so is QLED – the premium quantum dots displays that Samsung markets. But I kind of assumed they were equally expensive. Samsung is telling its business partners that QLED – which is an LED-lit LCD with a special Quantum Dots layer that accentuates the visual quality – is about a 20% premium on its standard commercial panel lines. OLED, which is entirely different, organic technology, is 400%-500% the cost of conventional LCD.

Ouchy-ouch!

Another side note: The Wall, the micro LED TV/display that Samsung debuted at CES and showed again at ISE, should be on the market by Q3. No price, but as I have been telling people, think Italian supercar. The first consumer buyers of these Walls are  likely roaming the midfield these days for Manchester City or Paris St. Germain.

That micro LED “Wall” will be shown at InfoComm in June.

Samsung is also telling its integration partners it will have a 1.2mm pixel pitch LED product on the market this year. Right now the tightest is 1.5mm, a size being used as the presentation backdrop. I was skeptical about LED as a replacement for that sort of thing, but it looks really good … even up pretty close. You’d kind of expect the fonts to break up because the canvas is LED, but from a logical viewing distance, they look tight.

A little crazily, I agreed to speak at all the various stops on Samsung’s Resolution Tour. I’m at one in Silicon Valley as we speak, in the shadow of the stadium where the 49ers play, and at two more next week in LA and Phoenix. There are further stops in Dallas, Tampa and Atlanta. Lotsa airplanes and my butt will never be the same.

The road tour stops are aimed at integrators and end-users. Registration info is here …