Just when we thought this was the year of micro LED, Hisense and Panasonic revealed vastly different products that change the way living rooms will approach TV.
Hisense is aiming to transform the giant altar altogether. The company has put intense development into laser projection TV technology, first unveiled at CES 2014. Now, these TVs are growing in demand in the consumer market – Hisense reported a 288% year-on-year growth in consumer market sales in 2020.
Despite strong competition from the likes of Samsung, Sony, and LG, its laser TVs have a 70% recommendation rate, compared to the industry’s 54% average.
At its press conference at CES this week, Hisense admitted it had originally developed laser TV technology for a niche market, but noted a consistent adoption by the mass market ever since it was released.
This year, Hisense introduced TriChroma laser TVs that it plans to use in future lineups. TriChroma uses an RGB laser light source architecture with different colour lasers, instead of laser-phosphor. This allows for an increase in resolution from 2K(WQHD) to 4K. Brightness has also been improved by 20% to 430 nits.
The new laser TVs will provide an improvement of 128% in covering the RGB colour space, and 151% improvement in covering the DCI-P3 film colours. This means these laser TVs do a better job of colour replication than high-end cinema projection.
More projection size options will be available for customers, with the TV line spanning from 75” screens up to 100”. Hisense also mentioned a 300” variant is in development.
These screens are aimed at the consumer market, but cater to various scenarios, including touch-screens for education, embedded screens for home fitness, and economical screens to aid in providing community services.
For those not ready to make the jump to laser TVs, Panasonic has a trick up its sleeve. Read about it on the next page.
Panasonic has announced its new flagship TV model: the JZ2000. This OLED panel adds low-latency technology and variable refresh rate via HDMI 2.1 – making it suitable for next generation gaming consoles.
The panel maker is well known as a premium brand in other regions because it provides extremely high picture quality on its OLED panels. The JZ2000 uses side-firing and upward-firing speakers for better sound quality that can provide a surround sound experience to users.
As with other manufacturers like LG, Samsung, and Sony, the new TV from Panasonic features an artificial intelligence-powered processor to optimise picture quality. The company says the AI processor identifies in real-time the content being played by analysing the picture every second. It then compares what the viewer is watching to a library of learned content to optimise picture and sound quality.
Low latency or input lag is a key purchasing factor for console gamers looking for a new TV. Panasonic says the latency in the JZ2000 is one of the lowest in the industry for an OLED TV. It also features HDMI 2.1, which enables variable and high refresh rates for gaming.
One of Panasonic’s strengths is that it creates its own panels. The new TV models feature the Master HDR OLED Professional Edition panel, which is brighter than other TV OLED panels on the market. This has enabled the company to work with movie makers for Filmmaker Mode: a setting that uses colour profiles from each supported film, ensuring users see the same colours that the colourists saw when they finished editing their films.
The TV also supports more traditional standards, like Dolby Vision and HDR10+ for lifelike content and richer colours. The TVs come in 55- and 65-inch options, which are smaller than the MicroLED competition revealed at CES this year.
The distribution of the JZ2000 is planned for North America, but has not yet been finalised. The TV’s availability in South Africa has not been confirmed.