Electronics manufacturer LG has shown off its new quantum dot television
at a trade show in the US, and it’s expected to be available in 2016.
A
new quantum dot television has been shown at the Consumer Electronics
Show (CES), the world's largest consumer electronics and technology
exhibition for technology that will become available in the next 12
months.
At the event, Korean electronics and display manufacturer
LG announced its new 4K ultra high-definition television displays
(UHDTVs) that use quantum dot technology to provide better colour
images.
The reason for using quantum dot technology for your
displays, instead of LCD or LED displays, is because it’s designed to
stop extra light from getting trapped in the internal filter, so it can
produce more robust colours without interference.
According to Laurence Murphy at The Conversation,
it works by having a beam of blue light shone through a series of
nanocrystals made from cadmium selenide. Each nanocrystal measures 2 to
10 nanometres (nm) across, and depending on its size, will emit a
different colour. Because this colour is dependant on its shape, it will
never, ever falter. "Those 4.2 nm quantum dots ... will produce that
exact same shade of red tomorrow and 20 years from tomorrow because it's
not tinting a white source light - the quantum dots produce only that
wavelength of red light when activated," says Andrew Tarantola at Gizmodo.
When
they're being produced for television screens, films of these
nanocrystals are arranged between layers of semiconducting materials, so
as voltage is applied to the whole arrangement, electrons are free to
slot themselves into the quantum dot layer and produce photons, or light
particles, says Tarantola.
A
special film made from nanocrystals that emit red or green light is
added to the front of the screen’s backlight, so when the blue light is
shone through them, they combine to produce white light, which interacts
with the rest of the quantum dots to produce a colour
display. "Generating light via the quantum dots narrows the wavelength
of the red and green light produced, meaning less light is caught by the
LCD filter," says Murphy at The Conversation. "This means better colour rendition and brighter colours.”
With
the integration of quantum dot technology into consumer electronics,
we’re seeing a quick march towards ultra high-definition television
displays (UHDTV) - the best contrast, highest saturation, huge range of
colours. While LG’s quantum dot television probably won’t be for
everyone the moment they come out - people who produce images for a
living, such as photographers, film producers, digital artists and
graphic designers, will get on it first - the technology will likely
replace LCD and LED displays in future years.
Murphy says
the reason this technology will so quickly hit the market is because
the standards for what makes UHDTV ultra high-definition have already
been set. "The ITU-rec 2020 standard for ultra high-definition
television allows for higher frame rates of up to 120 fps, higher bit
rates and larger contrast and colour gamuts,” he says.
And
it’s coming at just the right time. People in broadcast television and
cinema already know how to produce ultra high-definition images, but
there’s not a whole lot of use doing that if consumers don’t have
televisions that can display it properly. Quantum dot televisions will
hopefully match everybody up and we can get on with seeing ridiculously
beautiful colours the way the future intended.
And the best part?
Quantum dots are way cheaper than other high-quality display
technologies, such organic light-emitting diodes (OLED), as Tarantola reports at Gizmodo:
"There's
no always-on back light, each quantum dot-lit pixel only turns on when
it's actually needed. This saves as much as 50 percent of the energy
needed to illuminate a similarly-sized LCD screen while being 50 to 100
times brighter and expanding the available colour gamut (the total
theoretical number of colours a screen can produce) by up to 30
percent."
So this is happening now, and your huge LED or LCD TV is about to get, as Jerry Seinfeld says, "quite lame". As Murphy reports at The Conversation, "For
2015 and the foreseeable future, the world's best video and image
reproduction for high-definition content will be delivered with quantum
dots."
To understand more how quantum dots work, watch this:
Sources: The Conversation, Gizmodo
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