Samsung's next-gen OLED TV, the Samsung S95B, is an amazing TV and could well be one of the very best OLED TVs of 2022 and one of the best TVs full stop. But while it's a very impressive TV with truly incredible technology inside it, Samsung has even more exciting things in development. And one of the most exciting of those things is a new way of manufacturing Quantum Dot OLED panels that are so thin you could probably cut cheese with them.
More practically, that could transform the way TVs are made, how they look and how we use them. And it'll make them cheaper to make and cheaper to buy too.
For Samsung, thin is in
I love thin TVs: I've long since abandoned built-in speakers in favour of the best soundbars and the best AV receivers, so as far as I'm concerned the thinner the better. Measuring TV thickness in inches is so 2010: today's thinnest TVs are measured in millimetres, with TVs such as the sadly discontinued LG Wallpaper OLED TV coming in at just 2.5mm thick. As we said in our elegy for that particular model, the Wallpaper TV made it feel like the pictures were happing right there on the wall, so even the daftest TV show felt like you were watching a work of art.
According to reports in Korean media, which in turn have been reported by OLED Info, Samsung is working on really, really thin TV tech. At the moment, its QD-OLED display uses two glass substrates: one for the OLEDs, and one for the quantum dots. The new approach uses inkjets to print the quantum dots directly onto the OLED substrate instead. In the short term that means much thinner QD-OLEDs; in the long term, the reports say, the same tech could lead to flexible or even rollable QD-OLED panels.
Personally I'm not entirely sold on rollable TVs; as impressive as it is to have a TV that disappears when you don't need it, it's not something I particularly want or need. But a TV so thin it barely protrudes from the wall? Count me in.
