By AV Magazine in Products, Sponsored story May 26, 2022 0

For visual quality that really grabs viewers’ attention, microLED is hard to beat, says Andrew Douglas, LED product manager at Samsung.

It may sound small, but microLED packs a big punch. Unmatched for realism, brightness and flexibility, the technology is already established enough that no one could call it bleeding edge.

In fact, Samsung launched a commercial product in 2019 – The Wall, its acclaimed modular video wall. Now the company has begun launching its next generation of microLED solutions, with 1.6mm and 1.2mm already available and 0.8mm to start shipping in Q3.

But microLED is still unfamiliar to most AV buyers – perhaps because for a long time Samsung was virtually the only company that made a commercial product. We think that’s a real shame, since microLED is quite simply the best overall display technology on the market today, with a combination of ultra-realistic shades and textures, vibrant colours and deep blacks. Combined this with The Wall’s special technologies for video smoothing and content optimisation, and no other display type can come close. The fact that The Wall is also very straightforward to install and maintain is just the icing on the cake.

Think of any high-profile, high-impact location where someone would want to put a large-canvas display, and we think The Wall offers an unbeatable solution. A luxury car showroom, for example, has only a limited number of models and options actually on display. For the rest, customers must make do with images, and with The Wall, these can be as close as possible to the real thing. The Wall is so big that vehicles can be displayed at full life size for maximum impact, and its Black Seal technology delivers perfect black levels for immaculate contrasts.

Colour is a major marketing and branding tool for car makers, and The Wall ensures that customers see their potential purchase exactly as the designer intended. Its Ultra Chroma technology presents a narrower colour wavelength, resulting in colours that are twice as pure as conventional LEDs, spanning the entire colour gamut, while 20-bit processing showcases the deepest details of every shade. Even the pile on the upholstery will shine.

For spectacular audience events and auditoriums, The Wall’s almost limitless scale and flexibility, incredible definition, and ultra-realistic colours and textures guarantee audiences an experience that’s fully immersive and unbelievably lifelike. That’s why it was selected by The Forestias by MQDC in Bangkok, Thailand’s biggest property development project, to create a 360-degree theatre in the development’s Forest Pavilion.

Built from 384 separate modules, the wraparound video wall extends for nearly 40 metres around a canvas of almost 200 million pixels, creating a unique visual experience. As the development’s president put it: “The Wall enables The Forestias by MQDC to immerse visitors in an experience that feels as close to reality as possible.”

Sheer visual impact The sheer visual impact of The Wall’s vivid and vibrant imagery makes it a perfect digital canvas for displaying works of art, whether these are renditions of physical artefacts or digitally created works. In 2020 Samsung even organised an art competition, in collaboration with new media art platform Niio, with the winners displayed on The Wall installations around the world.

The overall winner was a video sequence depicting large boulders colliding in a Martian landscape, which perfectly demonstrates The Wall’s ability to replicate intricate, natural textures and fine details within a moving image. The winning artist, Dev Harlan, described The Wall as “a fantastic digital showcase for artists”, and we wouldn’t disagree.

In the corporate lobby and boardroom, too, The Wall enables companies to stand out and project the right image. The high brightness of microLED technology means it can maintain its vibrancy even in a sunny atrium, and its narrow pixel pitch means that business presentations will remain sharp and impactful even when the audience are up close – particularly when The Wall’s latest 0.8mm version ships in Q3.

Another environment where visual precision can be vital is the control room. Operators may spend long hours concentrating on multiple images, which need to be sharp, high-contrast and flicker-free. Samsung’s advanced 8K image enhancement technology offers super high resolution, and The Wall’s Micro AI processor can dynamically upscale any content to 8K, enhancing contrast and removing noise. Color Expert Pro calibration software enables The Wall to be calibrated exactly to meet the customer’s specific environment and needs.

In mission-critical environments such as control rooms, total reliability is also a must. The Wall’s remote power supply solution uses external power sources that can be installed separately from the screens, with spare power supply units that can take over if another fails, while the failed unit is hot-swapped with no down time.

Ultra-reliability is equally important in the broadcasting studio, where The Wall’s multiple features combine to deliver an unbeatable solution. Black Seal and Ultra Chroma technology produce the vibrant and natural colours that viewers expect, while Quantum HDR technology, including LED HDR and HDR10+ support, renders true-to-life imagery optimised for broadcasting, and 20bit processing and super-accurate greyscale expression help to create more precise and natural pictures.

In fact, The Wall’s microLED technology is so good that it’s difficult to distinguish from reality, making it possible to build a movie or TV production studio where live action scenes can be shot against a pre-recorded background, replayed on The Wall. In addition to the superbly natural picture quality, flicker lines are minimised by supporting the industry maximum 7,680Hz refresh rate, which can also be adjusted to match the camera frequency. The Wall’s Framelock technology guarantees that all content is synchronised to prevent screen tearing, and 60fps video signals are converted into a 120fps video stream, removing motion judder and enabling smooth and clear content, even in slow motion shooting.

Modular, scalable Of course, every studio is different, so The Wall, with its fully modular design and complete scalability, comes into its own. Concave, convex, inclined and L-shaped installations are all supported. CJ ENM, Asia’s leading entertainment and media group, used The Wall to create a virtual production studio in Paju, Korea. Towering seven metres high and 20m in diameter, it creates a seemingly endless backdrop to capture content of the highest quality. CJ ENM is delighted with it.

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