Today at CES Samsung announced its new line of 4k UHD TVs. They are now calling the SUHD televisions, because clearly this generation of display technology needed another name to confuse people.
This year’s top model line, the SUHD sets, are primarily set apart by Samsung’s nano-crystal semiconductor technology. We haven’t been able to get a lot of details on what this technology actually is, but they’ve repeatedly stated:
“SUHD TV’s nano-crystal semiconductor transmits different colors of light depending on their size”
So each nano-crystal semiconductor produces one color at a time. So one of the key questions is, how many of the semiconductors are in each panel?
They’ve also stated they have a new “re-mastering engine” built into the SUHD TVs. Again, they were very light on the details, but this simply sounds like a new name for the up-conversion process.
Of course, the new SUHD televisions are curved. Samsung claims that customers love the curved sets, and that half of all their UHD sales are of curved displays. While Samsung seems to think the masses like the curved displays, we still see it as a gimmick that we wish would die a quick death.
Samsung is also switching up their smart TV software to use their own Tizen operating system. The only feature that we liked was the transparent overlay of real-time sports data. Their example showed a shot chart during a basketball game along with individual player stats.
We’ll get up close and personal with Samsung’s new SUHD TVs this week. While they’ll undoubtedly look better than last year’s sets, we still don’t expect them to match the ultimate picture quality of plasma TVs. And to make matters worse, Samsung barely mentioned OLED.
