We’re a few hours out from the Samsung press conference where the firm revealed a new lineup of 3D-enabled plasma, LED and LCD TVs, as well as a complete ecosystem of 3D-ready devices. Samsung also highlighted their position in the smartphone market, as well as their developments in multi-platform application development.
3D television
Active LCD shutter glasses are required for 3D home cinema.
Samsung’s President of the America Consumer Electronics Division Tim Baxter began with a quick review of the history of 3D cinema which began with the anaglyph release of The Power of Love in 1922. Three-dimensional technology has evolved beyond anaglyph glasses into polarized lenses (as in AVATAR) and active LCD shutter technology (as with NVIDIA 3D Vision), the latter of which the home 3D cinema market is banking on.
In that regard, Samsung introduced a new array of televisions that are compatible with the recently-ratified 3D Blu-ray standard. In their LED lineup, the company revealed the LED 9000, LED 8000 and LED 7000 series sets.
At less than 0.3″ thick, the LED 9000 series is no thicker than your standard Dixon Ticonderoga #2 pencil. As the premium series in the company’s LED TV range, the unit contains advanced features like a control module which automatically undocks from the TV and presents itself to the user when the user approaches. The control module can switch between numbers traditional to a remote and to QWERTY for use with the company’s swelling variety of applications which run on their televisions. As a final perk, the control module’s touch sensitive LCD can play TV if the 9000 set is occupied with Blu-ray playback.
Rounding out the lineup of LED TVs, the 8000 series features a new–but unclarified–color technology which produces deeper blacks without halo effects, while the 7000 series offers few unique features, but competes well for quality and connections with higher quality LCD sets.
For those interested in cheaper televisions, the company also plans to offer the LCD 750 series and the 1.4″ PDP 7000, all of which also support the 3D Blu-ray standard.
While TV technology stole the show, Samsung was also quick to detail its efforts to cultivate a complete 3D ecosystem. These efforts include the BD 6900 3D Blu-ray player and a 3D-compliant 7.1 HTIB setup.
Finally, the company noted that the components spoken of today are fully compatible with today’s leading broadcast standards and the 3D Blu-ray spec, as applicable. That means Samsung’s 3D TVs will also work just as well for 3D television, such as the ESPN channel which will soon go live. And as a last perk, a home theatre assembled from these Samsung parts can convert DVDs or other 2D content into a 3D output, but the technology behind this announcement went unclarified, as did the resulting quality.
Departing from the technology, Samsung announced a partnership with DreamWorks and Technicolor to cultivate an ecosystem of content. To that end, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg delivered the world’s first 3D Blu-ray disc (Monsters v. Aliens), calling it a “watershed moment for the entire movie industry,” while Technicolor CEO Frederic Rose pledged to extend the company’s monumental influence in the cinema space to the home.
Applications
While consumers have observed a rather obvious uptick in the number of phones and mobile platforms baked with the ability to download and run custom applications, Samsung also envisions the same trend for televisions and Blu-ray players.
By the spring of 2010, Samsung will introduce an application store called Samsung Apps which centralizes application submission and distribution for all devices compatible with the store. That is, customers will be able to download applications for their TVs, phones and players that have been written by the community. Though the company did not provide complete details for the developer program, or the accompanying SDK, Samsung’s Tim Baxter hinted with an emphatic delivery of the word “open.” Baxter also noted that premium paid apps would follow in the summer.
The new Samsung Apps store will debut with the company’s new 3D-ready LCD, LED and Plasma televisions, which will ship with applications that can deliver Hulu, YouTube, Twitter, Vudu, Netflix and Picasa without a computer.
Miscellany
After covering apps and the home theater ecosystem, Baxter moved on to the many things Samsung is doing in other markets, including:
- Displays with 10mm bezels, offered in 1×3 and 2×3 kits specifically for AMD’s Eyefinity technology.
- The Samsung N210 netbook (presumably based on Intel’s Pine Trail) with 12 hours of “real world” battery life.
- The 1000-lumen F10 projector, which uses LEDs to offer a service-free lifetime of up to 10 years.
- The S16 camera which records in 1080i, outputs to 1080p, stores video on a 64GB SSD, and can stream its content to a TV wirelessly.
- And the IceTouch media player which features a fully transparent, full-color AMOLED display which is controlled via touch on the back of the display.
Final thoughts
While the Samsung presentation was laced with tones of exuberance and wild optimism, we’re a little more reticent about the immediacy of the 3D home cinema revolution. Many customers are more than satisfied with their current big screens and, given their average lifetimes, we’re more than decade off from complete turnover. Even customers who turn to buy a new TV within the year will most likely balk at the price commanded by LED and 3D in the same box. We’re also skeptical of Samsung’s promise that their 3D components can retool 2D sources into a 3D output with convincing quality, but we suppose that will remain to be seen.
All of this is not to say that 3D isn’t coming, however. Three dimensional home cinema is absolutely coming, and Samsung is definitely betting on the technology for growth. A full one third of their 2010 displays will be 3D-ready, the firm owns 80% of the LED TV market, and they plan to nearly quadruple their LED TV sales from 2.6 million in 2009, to over 10 million in 2010. Though these displays will initially be anchored to exceptionally high prices, it’s a future worth waiting for–we’ve never seen deeper blacks or sharper pictures from LCD tech, and the 3D was pretty respectable, to boot.
Articles RSS