LG and Samsung Are Making TV Screens Disappear

Dear Samsung, I will never ever buy one of your tvs again after you injected ads in my tv

Transparent TVs are high on my list of problems I urgently don’t need solved. R&D team must be freebasing whatever modern sci-fi VFX designers are on.

rtings just posted a video today about how LCD televisions with thin bezels WILL develop problems.

They went out of their way to say this is NOT because the televisions are inexpensive. It is a design decision. Samsung response was basically a non answer. These companies don’t care about the longevity of their products. They will happily sell whatever sells the best.

And if televisions break every three years, that’s good for business I guess?

https://youtu.be/wiO4b37RsIk?si=tci4FpUQDX_-qe38

I find the ‘future tech’ framing of this confusing. These have been available as commercial displays for at least 8 years, albeit with some availability issues on and off as the mfrs retool and reconsider the packaging. I just worked on a project that uses these as the windows of an augmented reality bus tour.

The article also fails to mention transparent LCD, which is a closely related cousin with inverse properties: where transparent OLED is emissive and is transparent where it receives black signal, transparent LCD is non-emissive (needs a backlight) and is transparent where the signal is white and opaque to a greater or lesser degree where the signal is black.

The article mentions using these displays, with a camera behind them for zoom calls.

Are these displays capable of only emitting light in one direction?

I would think that the light would bleed out both sides.

Also, there are plenty of existing teleprompter solutions using angled glass instead of a transparent led panel.

Naive question here: would not it be possible, and immensely cheaper, to achieve the same effect by having a horizontal screen that projects light at an angle over a vertical frame? Kind of like the good old slide projectors? With powerful LEDs like we have today and the right geometry it kind of sounds achievable to me.

Super excited on what this means for Mixed Reality tech by extension. Right now Optical see-through AR glasses can show information via a mirror / transparent screen. It's additive so, similar to a projector cannot show things darker than the background. Display See-through can and can thus achieve photorealism, but screen infront of face is a usability hurdle. Hope to see this tech combine the strengths of both by allowin a switch between optical see through and video see through.

Call me cynical but I never once looked at a tv and went “I wish I could see through this”.

I can see attractions in restaurants, shops, theme parks, airports, museums, etc but does it matter to consumers other than fancy picture frames/screen savers and showing the weather?

What if the image or text I’m looking at blends in with the color or texture of the real background? That wouldn’t matter commercially where displayed media is more controlled by the owner, but in a house you’re viewing casually.

It's neat tech, I wonder what the adoption curve will look like and what the price premium will be.

TVs are so predominant in our lives that room layouts and furniture are often designed around their presence. For example, the main TV in our house sits in a sort of built-in entertainment center/cabinetry. Making it transparent would be of no benefit. Also, many times people are hiding set-top boxes or media servers (and cables) behind the TV. Now those things need an aesthetically pleasing place to live, and cable management becomes 100x more important.

I can see applications for these, but it is going to require designing around them for maximum benefit. That will slow the adoption curve, which slows the price drops, perhaps keeping them in a niche segment for a long time.

Transparent touch screens are a big thing in many sci-fi tv shows. The set designers have no clue about usability. Seeing the background through my monitor would be the worst thing ever (is this the button? Oh no, it's my dog).

You know how you get nice augmented reality? This is how you get nice augmented reality. This gets interesting when you look at building it into windshields/visors/lenses/etc.

With a screen that looks the same on or off, I'm looking forward to always-on ads.

My company tested these transparent OLEDS or TOLEDS to deploy in our venues. It may seem like this is a gimmick, but it's transformative in digital interaction. Let me share a thought experiment. Have you ever been to a sports bar where there are TVs just everywhere and it's great when there's a big game but a huge distraction otherwise? TOLEDS do an incredible job at solving this and allow for some super awesome integration. For example, what if your bar counter had a glass top that could also double as a screen for you to use (Yes they can be touchscreen as well and only accept inputs from designated areas if needed).

I think the big thing here is also allows for transparency with objects and can be great for way finding or augmentation and disappear when not needed.

Some thoughts after using them extensively.

Oh, MicroLEDs! Because of the real-world problems with PC-monitor-sized-and-density OLED screens I've been waiting for PC monitors with these pixels to become available for mere mortals to purchase for a long while now.

They've been like five years away for five-to-ten years now, and that fact is very sad.

Man that’s crazy from the perspective of wires and transistors. The Expanse sci fi series television show always had pretty good demonstrations of tech to me, and this is queuing up those gadgets, cool!

Transparent screens doesn’t make much sense for consumer TVs (I know the article indeed points to other use-cases). You still need a black background to facilitate display of black content.

Will be very useful for dual led/eink displays. Stack a transparent led display on top of an eink display and you have the best of both worlds.

I'm more likely to get a Samsung Art series than this. I was in an AirBnB which had one and it really did take me 30min to appreciate I was looking at a display, because the schtick of a pictureframe and subconsciously assuming it's a rather vivid print of the great wave .. until you double-take because now it's a van gogh picture.

Use over windows? Seems an obvious application.

I found the microLED stuff at the end pretty interesting and went rabbitholing. If you're curious to learn more: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2631-7990/ac92ee/...

I thought relatively recent video codecs like HEVC don’t support transparency (alpha channels), but turns out I was wrong: https://larryjordan.com/articles/include-transparency-alpha-...

So Hiroshi Ishii's "Clearboard" can finally become a real thing outside of the original prototype?

https://vimeo.com/44544588

I'd like one of these for my wall mounted TV in the living room. It would be much nicer without the "black mirror" effect in what is an otherwise bright and colorful space.

Retail space seems like most obvious use case. Your malls and even street level shops could show advertising, sale prices and so on... Not possibly most horrid or offensive use...

LCDs without a backlight can already achieve a similar effect.

That's going to be amazing for VR.

No need for cameras outside to report what's going on to you inside, you can see through.

HUD (E.G: for cars), augmented reality on phones, monitoring for things like patients, babies...

If they manage to deal with the ambient luminosity problem, it can even change the architecture of your room. No more big screens, just windows letting light in, that you can switch to displays when you like.

Even for class room it's better: students will be visible behind their screens to the teacher.

It's going to be popular with executives who want their screen to disappear when someone is in front of them.

If they are transparent can they stack different colour pixel on top of on another instead of side by side?

Congrats to the author for teaching me a lot about display technology. What a well-writen article.

Cannot wait to see whatever the combination between these and Vision Pro is in a few years.

One usecase that occures to me, is a very larhe transparent screen in front of a stage at a conference with the presenter standing behind their presentation...

I've never seen anyone be so pessimistic toward new technology as the HN crowd. I can think of a million cool use cases for transparent screens.

They have a very sci-fi look.

I can surely appreciate this tech to put a small HUD in a car windscreen =)

something straight out of Pluto (netflix show)

Holy shit, this is such cool technology! To be honest, the progress in display tech in the last twenty years is mind-boggling. Stuff I never dreamed of is now common place. So far the most amazing thing was curved screens and bendable displays. Now transparent displays!

What is the point of that? just another useless gymnick like foldable phone displays.

Great now can we "layer" a bunch of these to make a fishtank sized thing that you sit around perched on your coffee table to watch sports in 3D without all that glasses nonsense? More like sitting in the best seats in the stand.

Commenters here are really hung up on the "transparent TV in my living room" use case, but the article goes out of its way to point out that's not really what these displays are for, especially given the prices.

The use-cases presented are:

* Teleprompter-like screen with a camera behind it allowing presenter to look straight into the camera while still seeing the screen.

* Windows in public areas (subway cars, elevators) that display advertisements or animations.

This is the future I was promised :)

Disclaimer, I don't actually own a TV as of 15 years or so. I consume most of my media on laptops instead (Netflix, Youtube, etc.)

This smells the latest in series of increasingly desperate moves. We've had curved screens, 3D screens, 8K screens, etc. already. Who needs those things? Why buy an 8K TV when there's no 8K content whatsoever.

Most people put their TV in front of a wall. That's because they are kind of big and expensive and you don't want to bump into all the time. Which with an invisible by design thing would be a thing. The value of seeing the wall through the TV is very limited. On the other hand, the value of not seeing the wall when you are watching something is pretty high.

See through screens would be great for AR but AR TVs don't sound like they are going to be a thing. This makes more sense in some kind of AR goggles. I could see some limited role for them for advertising like the article suggests but beyond that not really. That would work with normal screens as well of course and would have for the last few decades. But it's still not that common.