The Future of Big Screen TVs Is Very, Very Small
July 1, 2021
6 min read
Why analyst Eric Virey believes MicroLEDs will win the war for your television budget
Written by Adam Kovac
Illustrations by Allan Matias
Buying a television might be the most complicated simple purchase you can make these days.
It seems so uncomplicated: go to the store, decide on a size, stare at a few nature images or sports highlights or whatever loop is playing simultaneously on the screens that surround you and then point and say “I’ll take that one.”
Life is never that simple, and for those in the market for some new home entertainment, that’s a good thing. Television technology has branched out in recent years, giving consumers more options on price, definition, brightness and resolution. There’s Liquid Crystal Displays, which incorporate quantum dots. There’s organic light-emitting diode screens. But, according to Eric Virey, a market analyst specialising in LEDs at market research firm Yole Development, it’s only going to get better in the near future as the next big thing hits stores: MicroLED-based TV sets.
To be fair, MicroLEDs screens are already for sale, but you better have a pretty thick wallet if you’re hoping to Netflix and chill with the greatest picture quality currently available; a 110 inch MicroLED set is currently listed for around $150,000 a pop.
“Probably the single largest contributor to the cost is the MicroLED itself. It’s a semiconductor component, it's manufactured, in essence, in the same way that traditional semiconductors and microprocessors are,” explains Virey. “Today, they're expensive. And today, they're quite large. Because the industry hasn't learned yet to properly and efficiently make very, very small MicroLEDs. They use LEDs that are small, but still too large. And since the cost of this MicroLED basically scales with the surface, the bigger they are, the more expensive they are.”
Clearly, a $150,000 television set isn’t in the average family’s budget - as Virey puts it, it’s not the type of thing you’d see during a Black Friday sale. That’s not to say that you can’t see a MicroLED screen, even if you aren’t in the upper tiers of the one per cent. MicroLED screens are starting to roll out on the biggest playing field imaginable - literal sports stadiums.
“You’re already seeing giant video screens in stadiums and shopping malls. They’re LED-based. Until now, with MicroLEDs, you could get away with fairly large components. But as you try to improve the resolution, the quality with better and better screens, the industry is increasingly adopting smaller LED sizes. So, you’re going from traditional LEDs to mini LEDS to, soon, MicroLEDs.”
But just like Moore’s Law observed that computing power in a circuit doubled every two years, the tech behind MicroLED screens is advancing at a rapid rate. Virey predicted that by 2025, the cost of a MicroLED television would be down to between $2,500 and $10,000.
“That's pretty reasonable. If you take just one contributor, for example, the LED size in a Samsung is about 100 square microns per MicroLEd. The plan in the industry is to try to take that to five-by-five microns. Just by doing that, you’re cutting the cost of the MicroLED down by a factor of about 350 to 400.”
So, just what is all the fuss about? Well, as Virey puts it, every type of screen comes with its tradeoffs. LCD screens, thanks to quantum dots, have great colour and brightness, and come at a reasonable cost, but are limited by reduced optimal viewing angles. OLEDs have decent colour, good options when it comes to viewing angles and great contrast, but lacks brightness. That’s an important part of the viewing experience, according to Virey.
“Having the ability to deliver high brightness is better if you’re using your TV in a room that’s not darkened because the light emitted by your TV has to compete with sunlight reflections or any light coming in from the windows. If you have light coming in from outside and your TV isn't bright enough, it’s going to look dim and the colours are going to be washed out. I think a brighter TV helps improve the image quality in all viewing circumstances.”
That’s where MicroLED comes in—it’s the best of all worlds (with the obvious caveat of its current cost). Super bright, great contrast, great angles, extremely high resolution, the ability to be shaped and curved.
With all those benefits, Virey predicts the technology will be found in more than just television screens. In fact, he believes the most obvious use is something much, much smaller.
“The low-hanging fruit is probably the smartwatch because it’s a small display, so the cost is less critical. It's a small contributor to the total cost of the device, which means there’s more elasticity for a smartwatch manufacturer to accept higher display costs, especially if the display is really good and creates a lot of differentiation for the consumer. We believe it could and will be the first high-volume consumer application for MicroLEDs.”
An ultrabright, colourful and high-resolution smartwatch would hold obvious appeal to those seeking the latest tech trends. But what about the average consumer, who isn’t necessarily seeking the latest and greatest thing? Currently, 40 percent of televisions sold are priced at $250 or below. Does there come a point where the latest screen is met with a resounding “Meh. My current TV is good enough?”
“I keep asking that myself and my personal inclination is to think at some point, when you have displays that are indistinguishable from perfect, what else do you need? At that point, I will agree with that. There’s not much more you can do to compel customers to buy the new thing. But right now, there’s still room for improvement in terms of contrast, brightness, viewing angle, colour rendering, motion artifacts, et cetera. Maybe most people don’t notice that, but there’s always those audio-video nerds that are always chasing that extra few percentage points of performance improvement.”
There might come a day where screens are as close to perfect as humanity can get. But as Virey points out, that day has yet to arrive. We are living in “a moment where there’s a lot of exciting possibilities.”
“I don’t know that the display image has ever been in a situation with so many emergent technologies. Your grandparents' TVs were big, cathode-ray tubes and it was, for a very long time, the only TV you could buy. Then you started having a choice between LCD and plasma and LCD won the bottle. Now, you’ve got the choice between LCD and OLED. You’re starting to see choices between different flavours of LCDs. In five years from now, you might have the choice between entry-level LCD, LCD with MiniLED, MiniLEDs with quantum dots, quantum dots on their own, MicroLEDs on their own, MicroLEDs with quantum dots . . .