The huge TV screens of CES 2018 are coming for you! (The 3:59, Ep. 332)

[MUSIC] Welcome to the 359. I'm Ben Fox Rubin. David Katzmaier. The CES TEch Show iscoming in January and with it, the introduction of a lot of new TV technology. I invited David on to walk us through some of the biggest expected trends. Lets start with the easy stuff, HDR, 4K, how significant are those gonna be for the show Well they're going to be kind of the baseline. So 4K TV's and HDR TV's they're as cheap as 300 bucks now, so they're everywhere. The TV industry has moved on, so CES is kind of where you see the next step beyond these technologies. What do you think You're the most excited about as far as any of those tech? So I'm most excited about the competition between the manufacturers at this point. So right now we have a situation where at the high end of the market it's OLED, OLED, OLED. LG's organic light emitting diode technology is kicking everybodies **** It is the high-end TV that people wanna spend extra money to buy. How much is it, on average? How much would you spend for something like that? Well, the cheapest price for an OLED TV, actually it happened over Black Friday, 1,500 bucks for a 55 inch TV. Okay. That's expensive. Totally. But what I learned myself when I wrote this article, I asked NPD, which does a lot of market research, The average selling price is 1700 for TVs that are more than $1000. So that coveted high end of the market, that's actually not terrible. Now doesn't Samsung make [UNKNOWN] I mean like they're very well known for that for the smaller screens for the phones. Funny you should ask. So Samsung is by far the most dominant brand of televisions in the United States. They don't make an OLED TV, they make something called QLED, which came out last year. And I thought they were trying to be a little imitative of LG when they came out with that name. What is QLED? I saw that at Best Buy recently and I was like, I have no idea what that is. Did they try to write an O and then put a little Being on it, and hope nobody noticed, and maybe go home, and people like I have an Oled TV! Actually, no there's a little dot there across the bottom of the O. It's Q. So long story short, it's a Led LCE TV like they've been selling for years. Its not a brand new technology like LED, the difference is it uses quantum dots as the queue which kind of enhance the color of LCD but really it doesn't make that much of a difference when you are watching it Its an enhancement of. Yeah, LED. You're not gonna really notice. And I didn't notice when it was side-by-side in comparison with earlier models. It's a really subtle improvement. OLED on the other hand is like, Holy Crap! This TV really looks like a $1,500 to $2,500 TV. It's kinda awesome. Is Samsung looking to move into OLED? No. So right now Samsung has been responding to this question for a long time because LG wrote the book on OLED and they've been coming out with them for a while Samsung started actually making a little bit but then they pulled back and made more LCD, LED technology. One of the things that they might do is EES this year is introduce another competitive LED, I'm thinking it might be micro LED or actual another version cooler that's better. Tell me about micro LED. So LEDs are, in lights, and pretty much every lighting thing right now, they also power televisions. But they're behind LCD, liquid-crystal display panel Micro-LED gets rid of that liquid crystal display panel and just has a bunch of little dots that are LEDs that can change color. The advantage there, you can turn them all the way off so you get perfect contrast like OLED. They're brighter, it's kinda the Holy Grail for LED technology. But that's pretty similar to OLED, why would it be called something different? Because it's a slightly different technology? Yeah, and it doesn't use the same types of Of materials. So the LEDs are a different kind. So they're not organic, they're actually, they're saying they're more durable. They're actually used today in industrial lighting and those gigantic signs at Cowboy Stadium, for example. Those are all LED, true LED displays with no liquid crystal in front of them. So For some of the more futuristic tech stuff, voice control is something that's really growing, do you think like gesture control is really gonna grow at any point or we're gonna see some of that at CES? No. I don't think it will. I don't think the gestures are gonna go anywhere. I think it's all about voice. It's so much easier to talk to your TV than wave at it. That's too bad. But anyway, if you wanna read more about these stories check us out on cnet. I'm Ben Fox Reuben. David Katzmire. Thanks for listening. All right. [MUSIC]