Samsung’s New TV Is Just a Giant Wall

Photo: Adam Clark Estes / Gizmodo

ANYONE who’s read Fahrenheit 451 appreciates the awesome possible future where the walls of our homes are just televisions and we get to live in TV land. Well, Samsung just made that possibility a reality with a 146-inch MicroLED screen. It’s called The Wall, and it is breathtaking.

First revealed at Samsung First Look, the Korean company’s big event at CES, The Wall lives up to its name not only because of its size but because of its promised functionality. The TV is bezel-less so it completely blends into whatever surface it’s hanging on.

Samsung also describes the screen as the world’s first “modular TV” which is a phrase that only sort of makes sense. It’s not modular in the sense that you can break it up into little pieces in order to make it larger or smaller. Rather, the screen can be programmed to show the picture in different sizes. There’s one mode, for instance, that just shows a narrow image that stretches across the whole screen. The rest of the screen is black so it just looks like extreme letterboxing, but hey, it’s a new trick for Samsung.

Also new is the self-emitting MicroLED technology. Samsung says these are “micrometer scale LEDs, which are much smaller than current LEDs.” It was unclear exactly how much better resolution this would provide, but when the curtain went up and I saw The Wall for the first time, I gasped. It’s big and bright and beautiful. It’s also not entirely clear when this TV might go on sale and how much it will cost.

Boy does it feel futuristic, though. Whether or not that’s a future I’d want to live in, I’m not quite sure. You know, Fahrenheit 451 and its wall-sized TV was pretty dark. Maybe there is such a thing as too much TV. – gizmodo.com