Transcript & Summary: The billion dollar race for the perfect display

[00:00] here's a really weird statement display Technologies are evolving like crabs that's right you might have heard of the concept of a carcinization where a ton of different animals that aren't actually crabs have independently evolved to look and behave like true crabs implying that in many places around the world this is what the perfect physique looks like H just look at those pey little eyes I think this kind of process is happening with displays to LCDs oleds and micro LEDs which are the three most important [00:31] display Technologies right now are all trying to evolve into basically the same final form at least on the high end despite having started off as wildly different Technologies and to explain what I mean let's talk about how various displays work how they have evolved over time and what common future they all striving for [Music] next talking of Bey little eyes this video was sponsored by insta 360 after dominating consumer electronic devices from digital watches to calculators and more for decades LCDs became the [01:06] dominant full color high resolution displays in the mid 200002 when they quickly displaced the old CRT monitors and TVs unlike CRTs which fired an electron gun at a phosphor coated screen and therefore needed to be really quite bulky and heavy LCDs or liquid Crystal displays were our first true Mass Market flat panel displays and here's how they work on a basic level first there is a backlight usually emitting white light over that we have two layers of polarizers one only letting light with vertical waves through and the other one [01:39] only letting horizontal waves pass a light wave can't have both directions at once so by default these polarizers block out the backlight creating a black image now to show anything other than black there's a special material called The Liquid Crystal in between the two polarizers and by applying a current to this Liquid Crystal we can get it to twist the direction of the light waves that go through it which in turn allows us to control how much of the white backlight is allowed to pass through the [02:07] polarizer on the front turn it all the way into One Direction and we have white light turn it all the way into the other and we have a black image now we just need to divide the screen into many smaller segments and to put an RGB color filter over it and we have pixels that can create basically any color that we want and with that our basic LCD display is done with little crystals twisting around light to create an image and here's a macro shot of an LCD screen in my studio by the way where you can see [02:34] what all those little sub pixels actually look like in real life and while all of that is great LCD technology initially did have some pretty fundamental shortcomings all of these layers that we put in front of the backlight mean that a huge part of the backlight actually gets filtered out before it ever makes it through the panel which is really inefficient and meanwhile blacks couldn't be perfectly represented by this display because even the best polarizers let at least a little bit of the backlight through this [03:01] glowing gray backlight is a dead giveaway of any LCD panel and meanwhile viewing angles aren't perfect either because what comes out of the display is by definition very directional light now scientists have come up with many different improvements to this technology of which I think two are particularly important to mention these are two big technologies that have brought LCDs much closer to becoming the kind of ultimate display form the crap of the display world if you will first is that the backlight was turned from a [03:29] single large panel typically lit from one of the sides into a grid of smaller and smaller LEDs in current high-end LCDs we have thousands and thousands of these backlights so we call them mini LED displays and you can see this type of backlighting in action in expensive iPads and MacBooks high-end monitors like the Apple promotion monitor as well as in premium TVs having such fine control over the backlight allowed LCD Tech to have almost perfect blacks for the first time ever and it also allows panels to save power by not lighting up [04:00] their parts that are actually in the dark and the second big Improvement comes from improving their color filters see regular color filters are really inefficient because all they do is block or filter out every wavelength of our white backlight that isn't actually the color that we want meaning that the majority of the backlight just gets wasted so instead scientists have come up with Quantum dots these are special structures that if they are exposed to light of a certain color they themselves then emit their own light in another [04:29] color they don't really filter the light but rather convert it into a new color so there's very little waste here and so in a Quantum do LCD screen we add these layers of quantum dots over the backlight which then go on to create super vibrant and bright colors so by today a high-end LCD can already have fantastic colors and brightness from its Quantum dots and also very good control over its backlight with its mini LEDs while in the future we fully expect to be able to pack millions of these LEDs [04:58] in as a background if you think about it that means that LCDs have shattered most of their weaknesses and have moved a lot closer towards what we think of as the ideal display Technologies especially when you factor in that they are particularly easy to manufacture and really robust and indeed LCDs Remain the most popular display type across many different categories like TVs and computers okay but let's compare this with lcd's biggest competitor OLED this is a completely different display technology with its own very unique [05:28] strengths and weaknesses but over time this two has started to evolve into becoming a very similar final output as lcd's kind of convergent evolution so an olet screen is made by placing millions of tiny drops of a special organic material onto a surface typically using a process called vapor deposition each little drop gets sandwiched between the anode and the cathode which allows us to run electricity through them individually which then causes them to light up this is why we call them organic light emitting diodes which form [05:58] our sub pixels which you can all now individually control now historically there have been two major approaches to making an OLED display one really suited for making smaller displays and the other really suited for making large ones for smaller devices like smartphones Samsung pioneered their technology that they called AMOLED while for large screens LG dominated the panel production with their Tech being called W OLED and with time each of these have been trying to move towards the middle in size so that's why by now we're [06:28] slowly starting to see a creeping into tablets computers etc on smartphones the actual diodes themselves directly produce either a red a green or a blue color there are no backlights no crystals no color filters not even polarizers in the latest Generations nothing just little dots that light up meaning that this is an extremely straightforward display technology in fact if you take a look at a real close-up of one of my screens you can see the individual little light dots actually doing their work now you'll [06:57] notice that they are arranged in a funny pattern which has to do with your eyes being more sensitive to green colors than they are to the other two colors in this Matrix and to the blue material used in the screens actually wearing out quicker for example but the principle of the display still is just as we have discussed now it turns out that while these individually colored diodes work great on smaller displays they are much harder to pull off on really large screens which is while on large monitors [07:23] and TVs for example we have more or less been stuck with LG's wolet technology in stat and here stands for white Because the actual oleds themselves are white and then color is created by putting an RGB filter over them so you still have individually lit pixels but we're now back to white light passing through a filter and since LG panels have white light already they actually also include a white sub pixel in each arrangement as well to maximize the screen's brightness so if you think about it this means that [07:53] with wed each pixel basically has its own white backlight that means that the smartphone style olet screens are technically more pure I guess but either way the benefits of an olet screen regardless of which one you use are actually pretty clear both olet types require way way fewer layers than LCDs do so they're both insanely thin you can make them almost completely transparent and they are of course also easily flexible pixels can individually be controlled and turned off which saves power creates contrast and creates [08:25] completely black blacks and you get almost instant response to times two since you're just switching individual LEDs on and off so that's great but of course just like LCDs olets had their pretty clear disadvantages as well so they have to go through quite a lot of evolution to move towards becoming the ultimate display type you know the crab of displays and with olet the majority of the issues come from the fact that their LEDs are organic and this doesn't mean that they're grown in soil with love and care and never see pesticide it [08:54] just means that they're made out of hydrocarbons but either way they can be pretty problematic specifically the materials degrade very quickly if you expose them to air for example but also if you just show the same bright image on them for too long and then they create what is called a burn in where an image permanently gets burned into your screen ratings.com made a fantastic long-term test with lots of olet TVs and monitors which I've linked to down in the description you should really check it out if you're worried about burnning [09:21] modern devices will usually help avoid burn in for example by shifting static content around a little bit but the only real solution historically has that the olet devices just didn't let you make your screen super bright now of course in this video we're talking about the evolution and indeed both Samsung and LG have found ways to make their olet screens much brighter without actually putting any additional strain on the olets themselves for LG we have the brand new MLA or micr lens array technology which adds a grid of [09:51] absolutely tiny little lenses over the LED panel that focuses all the light that would have otherwise scattered around the panel here's a mhot of the actual monitor from the Fantastic HDTV test video that I've linked to down in the description and you can see an actual tiny grid over the sub pixels with LG claiming that they have something like 5,000 tiny lenses per pixel this lens array boosts brightness by something like 60% and does so completely passively without having to push more electricity through the pixels [10:21] which is good for longevity and for keeping your electricity bill down too this Tech has already shipped in the latest generation LG TVs like the G3 for example and should be available to other TV manufacturers using LG panels on the highend too and as for Samsung TV panels their solution was to basically take LG's OLED implementation but to use quantum dots over them rather than color filters so Samsung calls these their QD OLED TVs and they look absolutely stunning as well like LG Samsung also starts with a single colored organic LED [10:53] though theirs is actually blue instead of white so for the blue subpixel they just allow this light to pass through unhindered but then for the other two they add you've guessed it quantum dots to create a really bright red and green sub pixels so this way we can have our three primary colors except each can individually be way brighter than those coming out of LG's olet TVs because Samsungs don't have to pass through color filters I'd love to maybe someday see a QD OLED TV that also has a micr lens array technology for the ultimate [11:24] OLED experience but either way these two manufacturers have basically overtime solved many of the biggest problems of olet screens which was that they couldn't get really really bright without damaging the panel so olet Technologies are also moving closer and closer to this kind of ultimate display form the crab of displays basically and actually there's a lot to be excited for the future of OLED as well and I'd like to hire four upcoming new Innovations here first according to thec Samsung is planning to launch so-called tandem [11:53] oleds in 2024 where they place two OLED layers above each other this way you can get double the brightness at Peak and four times the lifespan of the oleds because neither of the layers has to individually run as intensely during day-to-day operations and the El claims that 2024 iPads might be getting these already wild oleds over oleds second a company called UDC claims that their blue pH OLED materials are coming to screens of Samsung algae and more by 2025 too here they would replace the current material that is used in blue [12:29] subpixels with a new one that should be four times as efficient at converting electricity that we put through it into light leading to huge efficiency and brightness improvements Wild Third we have Micro OLED screens where the pixels are deposited straight onto a piece of silicon this means that the whole control Electronics basically becomes a chip on the back of the screen itself and so you can make tiny and insanely high resolution olets that are perfect for high-end VR like Apple's Vision Pro [12:58] headset and for example the big screen beyond that are starting to use these screens and fourth Samsung is experimenting with replacing the blue organic LEDs completely in their qola TVs with gallium nitride or Gan nanor rods which aren't organic and don't burn in at all so we could theoretically get to all the upsides of OLED with none of its downsides well I guess in that case we'd have to stop calling them oleds because there'd be nothing organic about the screens anymore but if you think about it this is actually what my crab [13:28] Evolution the theory is getting at bullet makers are trying hard to fix their burning issues and to increase their brightness levels meanwhile LCD makers are trying really hard to miniaturize their backlights and to make their colors pop more too in the end they're both trying to achieve pretty much the same result a bright colorful screen that is really robust long term where light is controlled at or really close to pixel level and both camps are trying to get there faster and cheaper than the other that is basically [13:58] convergent solution but if you pardon my crab analogy just one more time I promise you if you think about it LCDs and oleds are both kind of false crabs they're starting at completely different positions that are not the final end result where they want to get to and they're slowly moving towards a common goal but there's actually a true crab that is already doing all of the things that these two want to do as well it's called micro LED and it's arguably the truest manifestation of what we want the [14:27] future of this place to be here tiny little individual LEDs are stacked next to each other to form sub pixels and they are arranged into a grid to create one big display now unlike on an OLED display where we use vapor deposition to kind of spray some dots onto a single surface micro LEDs are made using millions of actual separate physical LEDs you can literally divide these LEDs into smaller blocks and combine them into really big screens and on paper at least they have all the characteristics that you'd want like oleds the pixels [15:00] are individually lit but like LCDs there is no organic material so the panels can get insanely bright without a chance of burning in it's the perfect display it's the true crap except we don't really know how to make them yet I mean I've seen a bunch of micro LED displays myself at a trade show and while they're better than ever you can still clearly see alignment issues the panels are insanely expensive there's only a few of them and the pixels are nowhere near small enough to create any reasonable [15:27] display that is smaller than the size of your wall also for now companies are individually picking and placing millions of physical LEDs next to each other for each sub pixel which is just insanely timeconsuming and prone to a lot of Errors new manufacturing techniques are being invented as we speak and experts say that maybe in 5 to 10 years we will get real Mass Market micro LED TVs as well but still this means that the race for True crab hood or at least getting there first is still there and then this race being able to [15:57] ramp up manufacturing and keeping error rates and costs low is just as important to success as any supposed technological advantage and it's also completely possible that yet unproven Technologies like electroluminescent Quantum dots for example or something completely different will beat all of our current contenders anyway now talking of crabs I'm actually planning to be on the beach pretty soon I typically take one bigger holiday in a year usually in the winter that is coming up soon and so for that [16:25] I'm planning to take my favorite holiday gear which is my insta 360 camera specifically the insta 360 X3 is my goto pick for any outdoor activities that I do because it's easily the most fun and creatively challenging camera that I think I've ever used you effortlessly get this 360° perspective that you can then reframe afterwards to pick any part of the footage that you want and this just creates so many insanely fun shots that simply would not have been possible with any other type of device you can [16:54] put the camera on a selfie stick that it simply cuts out to make invisible so you can pretend that you have an invisible camera person behind you or around you you can have that invisible camera fly around you in space to make a shot that I think even a drone couldn't really capture in this way you can get really unusual perspectives by squeezing through tight places and there's even a dedicated nose mode for when you want to hold the camera in your mouse which I can't wait to try out of my holidays it [17:19] just looks like so much fun I even used mine on a dive case on multiple previous Dives and with that I not only documented a multiple scuba diving trips but I even shot two different YouTube videos where I reviewed dive watches oh and a few months ago they also brought out their next Generation dive case that the camera can apparently make completely invisible underwater this is something that I'm really looking forward to trying on my holidays overall the image quality is great at 5.7k so you can confidently reframe your shots [17:46] and the app works super well on both Android and iPhone both of which I've tested extensively you can edit and Export everything right here from your phone and you can even do crazy things like have ai replace the sky in your shop Nots pretty wild I'm a huge fan because there's basically nothing else on the market that works like this camera and it works so well and of course I also have a really good deal for you the first 50 people who buy from insta 360 with my link will get a 10% discount on the product and they'll get [18:14] a free 128 GB SD card and the complimentary invisible selfie stick as well so check them out I hope you get creative with it and I'll see you in the next video [Music]