Panasonic’s vision for the future at the IFA – Transparent OLEDs and the best LCD TV ever

According to the brand, 8k will certainly be important in the future, but at the moment buying an 8k TV hardly makes sense, because it will be many years before enough 8k content is available to justify the purchase of such a TV. justify TV. We wholeheartedly agree with this because before we really get to 8k there is so much more to get out of 4k than has been the case so far. We were therefore pleasantly surprised when Panasonic shared a vision of the future with us in the form of two prototypes at a TV event.

The translucent TV

The first prototype that was shown was a transparent television. This idea is not new and yet it is. Here’s the thing: ever since the arrival of OLED televisions, we’ve seen prototypes of transparent screens at trade fairs. Because OLEDs themselves generate light, no backlight is required, so it is relatively easy to make a transparent screen. After all, the substrates on which the OLEDs are applied are already transparent. This type of screen has been produced for the B2B market for years, but they are not suitable for the living room.

The big problem is in the display of black, because OLEDs can only generate light and not remove light. For a good black display, you will therefore have to stop the light that is visible through the screen, but that will immediately undo the transparency of the screen. Panasonic has now found something that can stop the light behind the screen when you want to watch TV. When you switch off the TV, the screen becomes transparent so that the TV blends nicely into its surroundings.

Panasonic does not want to say exactly how the light is stopped, but it is likely that the same technology is used that we also know from electrically dimmable interior mirrors in cars and the dimmable windows in the Boeing 787-Dreamliner. They use a special gel that is located between two glass plates. The gel darkens in a few seconds when tension is applied and lightens when tension is removed.

The prototype we saw at IFA delivered excellent image quality with the dimming system switched on, and in the transparent mode only the bright parts of the image were visible. The screen was mounted in a wooden frame with lighting at the top, behind the screen, to emphasize the transparent effect. Panasonic plans to develop the prototype shown into a product that should be on sale sometime in 2020. They will mainly need that time to think about sound reproduction, because the prototype shown was not equipped with loudspeakers. We think it is quite a task to hide speakers in a wooden frame, so we are very curious about the solution to this problem.

Codename: MegaCon

At the last CES, in Las Vegas, we saw a prototype TV at Hisense that used two LCDs in a row. The front LCD was equipped with the usual color filters and had a resolution of 3840×2160 pixels. The rear panel was monochrome, so it didn’t have any color filters, and had a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. The idea here is that the rear LCD is used as a light modulator for the backlight, creating a kind of full array local dimming backlight with more than two million zones.

Panasonic showed a prototype at this IFA that is based on the same idea. It was presented under the exciting codename MegaCon. As we know, Mega stands for million and what Con stands for is also easy to guess. So, just like the Hisense prototype, the MegaCon uses two LCDs, but in this case the second monochrome panel has a resolution of 3840×2160 pixels. As a result, all pixels are equipped with their own dimmable backlight. The result is a breathtakingly beautiful image that is very reminiscent of OLED due to the enormous contrast.

Panasonic uses IPS panels for this screen. These types of LCDs generally have a contrast ratio of around 1000:1. This means that the light from the backlight can be reduced by a factor of a thousand by the rear LCD. The front LCD can in turn also weaken the light by a factor of a thousand, bringing the final contrast ratio to around 1,000,000:1. On paper, perhaps not as good as with OLED, because with an OLED screen the pixels can be completely switched off, but in practice the contrast is of course just as good and there is no difference in contrast.

Now you may think; nice that the image of an OLED can be reproduced with two LCDs, but why would you want that? OLED televisions are becoming cheaper and this is of course not a cheap construction. The main reason for choosing this relatively expensive solution is the clarity. An OLED TV has a peak brightness of, in the best case, 1000cd/m². The MegaCon display has the same peak brightness, but this brightness can be achieved without limitations and in all conditions. This is not possible with televisions with an OLED panel, because they have an automatic brightness limiter that prevents the panel from consuming too much power. As a result, the maximum brightness drops to about 160 to 170cd/m² when displaying a completely white screen.

In addition to red, green and blue, current OLED TVs also use white sub-pixels to achieve peak brightness. You usually don’t notice much of that, but the color saturation can decrease in the lightest parts of the screen. The Panasonic screen uses normal RGB pixels, so that the colors are also perfectly displayed in the highlights. The accuracy is so great that Panasonic claims that the MegaCon screen can be used as a reference monitor in film and television production.