The holiday season is upon us, and that often means shopping, whether for others or yourself. No gadget looms larger in a household than a TV — often literally, given how they keep getting bigger and bigger. Samsung’s Scott Cohen is well aware of the race to take up space, and he explains it as the will of the consumer. Cohen appeared on Digital Trends Live, DT’s live morning show, to talk about the TV industry’s push for ever bigger screens, the importance of higher resolutions, and the impressive features of Samsung’s QLED line.
If you’re shopping for a TV this December, Cohen (don’t be shocked) recommends Samsung, particularly a QLED model.
“We get asked ‘What’s QLED?’” Cohen says. It’s simply Samsung’s flagship TV model line. ‘Q’ stands for ‘quantum dot.’ Quantum dot is a technology that allows our TVs to be even more accurate with color, produce brighter colors, and also be able to produce a panel that works just as good in a bright, sun-drenched room as it does in your man-cave or dark basement. So a really versatile TV which is great for any environment.”
QLED TV’s don’t just look good, according to Cohen; they’re also easy to set up. To get the most out of a smart TV, users have to connect it to their home network as well as connect all their streaming accounts and so on, and the QLED line makes that easy, with a feature that allows the TV to “pair up to your mobile device and then pull your home network information off your mobile device and share it to the TV, so getting your TV on the network is ass easy as 1-2-3. We actually automatically program the Samsung remote to work with all your connected devices …” so whomever you buy the TV for, “they’ll get it hooked up without installation, get going really quick,” Cohen says.
For the modern consumer, convenience matters, but so does size.
“… we’re pushing to bigger and bigger TVs,” Cohen says. “50 and 55 [inches] were big, 65, 75 are starting to become standard — and it’s a lot harder to hide these TVs in your room.” That’s why Samsung has introduced an ambient mode, that enables the TV to blend into the wall behind it, a sort of high-tech camouflage.
As TVs get physically bigger, however, they also need to get more accurate. The larger a screen is, the more details viewers will be able to pick out, and if the resolution doesn’t keep up with the dimensions of the screen, images will look blurry.
“Back 15 years ago when we were all watching tube TVs and 32 and 36 were big, everything was fine,” Cohen says. The resolution story started when we moved up to flat-panel 43-, 50-inch, and bigger, we needed to move to high definition. And when we moved to high definition, all anyone could talk about was the clarity, because as you blow the picture up, you need more information on the screen … now we’re moving up into 82 and bigger, and the bigger the screen, the more information you need to put there, and 8K is talking about resolution, the number of pixels, we’re moving up to 33 million pixels, so that at the large size you can still see the same clarity that you enjoy on your 55-inch.”
Digital Trends Live airs Monday through Friday at 9 a.m. PT, with highlights available on demand after the stream ends. For more information, check out the DT Live homepage, and be sure to watch live for the chance to win occasional prizes.
