Got new LG OLED.
Also got Nvidia Shield TV Pro.
LG has no connection to the internet, Shield's home page is the only thing I see when TV turns on. No ads, no hassle, one remote for all, fully customer controlled environment
I also got a new LG. I purposefully didn't connect it to the internet because of ads.
What happens? I get a popup every few times I turn on the TV telling me that I can enable Alexa support by connecting it to the internet. It's an ad. For itself.
I connected it to the internet. Now I get other ads in that way instead.
Genuinely curious - which model is this?
I bought a LG C2 OLED last year (still current model) and never experienced this. It mentioned alexa support on the box, but I have never seen any popups related to it.
FWIW - on most LG TVs, you can 'revoke' your acceptance of the EULA, which essentially returns the TV to non-smart status. Most of the tiles will disappear from the home screen, as will the ads. Depending on the model you might need to futz with the settings to make sure that the TV defaults to the hdmi input instead of the homescreen when you turn it on.
I used to own a C2 in Brazil. Never accepted EULA. Noticed that the notification system sometimes notified me of TV Globo newest productions, begged me to install Alexa, begged me to install other random crap.
And when a guest accepted EULA it promptly filled my home screen with "recommendations" of documentaries about Porn, with explicit posters included.
I then threatened to sue them. The porn recommendations stopped and they sent me an apology, but the other ads remained.
Since many decent panels are sold by display OEM's factory divisions to other TV makers, I'm hoping some non-OEM brand finally figures out there's a big enough opportunity here to spec a new model with the highest-end panel they can source and pair it with the most elegantly minimal front-end possible. Then promote it with a clever ad campaign highlighting that it will never have ads and never bother you.
With the development time and money saved they could afford to implement a few thoughtful touches like a physical master on/off switch. If that switch is on, then the TV is on whenever power is present. This allows it to be controlled with a simple home automation power plug. A soft on/off control can still exist downstream of the physical switch.
Sony has decent TVs that have Android TV with settings you can shut off. However I never connected it to the internet and I am never bothered by pop-ups.
The Roku TVs I put in my family’s vacation home are terrible. They oversaturate the image to account for the shitty display. Don’t use it a lot so I don’t care.
No, I don't need to learn about this new show you have on some service I don't have a subscription to. No I don't want this app to setup an applet on the homepage.
All I want is a list of apps, a settings button and a shut down one. On a plain black background with no moving part.
Under the "What happens when Apps only mode is on" heading, it clarifies that it only removes recommendations, not ads.
> In Apps only mode, you don't get personalized recommendations on your home screen. You’ll find a list of installed apps that you can open to find something to watch. You'll also find sponsored content and teasers for popular movies and shows.
My Chromecast with Google TV on Apps only mode recently has a full screen, undismissable ads of a YouTube show on the top of the launcher. It is not present if you don't scroll up, but the settings button and account switcher is up there.
Android atleast has the possibility of being an open platform. You can install a different launcher, even if the platform makes it difficult to keep it permanent if you don't know what you are doing. There's no way to avoid it when Apple wants to advertise Apple TV shows to you.
Well luckily the Apple TV platform has had 17 years to develop that feature and it hasn’t happened yet. Never say never and all that, but almost two decades is quite the track record.
You mean the top part of the screen? That is up to the app developer to control. Some like YouTube use it as an image, others like Plex show the next episodes to pick up on as well as giving an option to resume playback.
The Apple TV app might advertise their services, but that doesn’t mean the Apple TV platform is doing any advertising. You only see the app’s ads if you hover over it on the Home Screen and if you remove the app or move it out of the way, you no longer see its ads.
Yeah. For example, IIRC Disney plus doesn’t show anything there. You can also make Tv Plus app show the “up next” instead of “what you watch” in that space.
LaPlace even has a formula for determining the likelihood of an event happening, that hasn't happened yet. Using LaPlace's formula, there's just about a 5% chance of Apple TV adding that misfeature in the coming year.
If you are unhappy with Plex on Apple TV, check out Infuse. You have a pay a little yearly for it, but it does a much better job of supporting higher-end/advanced media features and the app is nicer than Plex. It can seamlessly connect to a Plex server as well.
It is annoyance, but for now, there's a workaround (on Nvidia Shield): disable auto updates in Play Store, uninstall Android TV Home updates. You will get the old launcher, without nagging you about stuff you have no interest in.
Yes! I run Projectivity on all my Android TV streaming sticks and it makes Android TV not only usable but good again. Also essential is side loading the SmartTube app, which is an ad-free YouTube player that fixes dozens of annoying things about YouTube. YT without SmartTube is torture.
(note: Since SmartTube will spoil you making regular YT unbearable, a similar fix for desktop browsers is to install a collaborative community UserScript called "Nova YouTube".)
Occasionally it may break because for obvious reasons Google does their best to force people to use their unwatchable page, but usually the fix comes out very quickly.
How to make it perfect? Move from Electron to Tauri and make also a Kodi extension. I use Invidious on LibreElec/Kodi, but it's not even close.
I've been using FLauncher for a couple years now and it's great. Very minimalist and only shows the apps you specify on the home screen. Highly recommend giving it a shot.
This has been my solution for the Shield as well. It does the job well enough, with only an occasional weirdness or crash. And it starts up again quickly in those instances.
Low key, not expensive; they drive a couple old Panasonic plasma TVs I have. St one point, I was a big Chromecast fan but that seems to have been largely abandoned and Apple TV seems more functional.
They advertise for their other shows before the show you're actually trying to watch now though. sure it's not an ad for foot cream, but it's still an ad and I don't like it
That is specific to TV app, not to device thought. You can see some shows on the main menu on background by default, for me personally that is not problem, and I think you can customize that.
Are you confusing the OS with the Apple TV app? If you change the order of apps in home screen, first one is used by default to show the background information in home screen.
perhaps you don't see the ads that apple forces when you watch an appletv (the service, not the hardware) on the appletv (the hardware, not the service).
plus almost every other app follows suit on the appletv (hardware, not the service), so that all apps on the appletv (hardware, not the service) end up having ads, not just the appletv (service, not the hardware) app on the appletv (hardware, not the service).
nope, not confusing at all, but still lots of ads.
Are those Apple TV+ shows on the Apple TV App, or shows provided by some other service via the Apple TV App? AFAIK the US and some other countries support grouping streaming service catalogs in the Apple TV App, e.g.: Peacock and Paramount+, so you don't have to set foot in the specific apps. But I assume they still deeplink into them for the actual viewing, where e.g. Peacock shows a pre-roll ad.
Apple TV+ shows, on the Apple TV app, on the Apple TV hardware now often (not every time, but very often) have ads in the front the show, and before you ask, yes with a paid Apple TV+ subscription.
and yes, of course the other shows that can play in the Apple TV app also show ads at the beginning, but they do that in their own apps on the Apple TV hardware as well.
can I just note that calling hardware, app, and service the same thing is a bit confusing?
No, that's not how you do it. Cunningham's Law requires a positive assertion:
"Samsung TVs have NEVER spontaneously connected to Wifi. That's just internet BS."
I know there are patents for it. There are patents for a lot of things that never make it to market. I'm not sure whether this has ever happened or people just assume the well-publicized (relatively speaking) patents mean it has actually happened.
I've tended to guess that the legal implications of connecting to random hotspots are complicated enough to prevent it from happening at scale. It's clearly not a technical problem to hook up to hot spots set to be open without passwords, after all.
It also might simply not be worth it with open hotspots not being that common anymore. Tbh, I'd expect TV manufacturers to ship a SIM with the TV before even seriously considering using random hotspots.
Yeah, an unhappy side effect of the bandwidth of 5G is that that may become economical, even for light video ads. I'm not sure they'd want to pay for really heavy video ads, but even that's probably coming into range.
Previous gen could probably afford images, but I'd bet 4G video where the manufacturer is paying for the cell connection probably couldn't swing the price of video.
I'm interested in learning more about this behavior as I'm in the market for TVs but Google doesn't seem to have much on this topic. Do you have any links on this?
only in certain countries it seems. When I'm VPNd into the US for an extended period of times ads pop up, but when I disable it, they relatively quickly go away.
Then someone replies, "I connected it to the internet. Now I get ads ..."
It's like commenters submitting replies just skip over certain sentences like they do not matter.
What I am curious about is what happens if one gives the TV an internet connection but no DNS. I am assuming it gets its DNS server IPs from DHCP, TV owner controls DHCP and sets up a local authoritative DNS server with wildcard RR pointing every domain to nowhere.
If a popup asks someone to connect the TV to the internet, can that person ignore the popup. According to the parent comment, the TV still works without an internet connection.
The decision whether to let the TV have an internet connection still rests with the TV owner, i.e., the internet subscriber.
The one who pays the internet bill decides when internet connections are made. Software developers might believe someone else's bandwidth is theirs to use as they please. They might employ dark patterns to get "permission" or "consent".
But neither developers nor advertisers are paying for the victim's internet connection. It is not their choice to make.
Nope. God bless hardcoded DNS and DoH, among other things, taking network control so far away from the network owner all in the interests of advertising. The TVs will find their way around it, TikTok style.
If you're already stuck with a Samsung TV for now. Go into Settings -> General and disable firmware updates. Revoke all the EULA and Privacy permissions. Then add the following to your router's URL block list:
Not of them are safe but almost all of them (including Samsung) will not be able to display ads when you use it as a display only and never give the TV internet access. I just have mine hooked up to a regular computer since I like to have all my movies and series completely offline anyway, so no need for crappy streaming "apps".
I'm incredibly happy with my 42" tv I got from MediaWorld (that's the italian name, it's called MediaMarkt in Germany and Switzerland I think). The brand name is "Ok".
It has a 42" FHD panel and two hdmi input. It's got ZERO smart features. For ~250 euros.
I love it. I'll keep it around as much as possible.
> Dear Samsung, I will never ever buy one of your tvs again after you injected ads in my tv
Who doesn't do that today, however? Consumer brands and models all fall into this category. Short of buying a signage display or a big monitor, both being a lot more expensive than a Smart TV also because of their better build quality, I don't see how one could protect themselves from that crap just by using consumer products.
Yes. They are sold as replacements for TVs whose original boards have failed, but are essentially a dumb TV board, with a tuner and often some media capabilities too.
There are even some "smart" ones now with (presumably more hackable) Android built in, if you want a little more than a dumb TV.
I did this to disable the "Samsung TV Plus" app that is impossible to uninstall, and otherwise impossible to stop from periodically taking over the TV (e.g. instead of booting to the last app that was opened or last HDMI input, it starts its own app instead, or after Netflix has gone idle for awhile, it switches to its own terrible channels).
I blocked every Samsung domain that I possible could in a fit of rage.
Now, instead of getting some random jarring channels when I turn on the TV (or.. random times), at worst it's a black screen that says "something went wrong" and I open the thing I want. The TV just slams the pihole with failed DNS requests over and over.
I must be missing something, because the use case for transparent TV is completely different than an ordinary TV due to the lack of black contrast, no?
We have a lot of pure black substance (and paint) but again this is solving a problem nobody really has.
Perhaps combining a transparent display with a pure black gives better blacks for displays but until there's better color control this would result in a much worse television.
And miss out on ad revenue? No, they'll just silently mark your warranty as void and continue to force feed you and your family targeted advertisement while siphoning out all the private data they can gather from your living room and your network.
Why not just a curtain of black fabric? Spray paint requires some skill to apply consistently and without waste, whereas a clip-on fabric is far harder to screw up and less likely to void your warranty.
The issue I really want to see addressed is the development of TVs that perform well in bright rooms or outdoor environments. While the Samsung Terrace reportedly does a good job, its price is prohibitively high. Is creating such TVs a particularly difficult challenge?
A typical TV is 300-400 nits, and 1000 in smaller regions gives you pretty good HDR. A light gray object in sunlight is above 10,000 nits. It's hard.
A Terrace can do 1500+ nits, and it's about the best you can get for full-screen brightness, though for 50%-of-screen brightness rtings lists some TCL models as beating it and some several other models as being close.
Not helpful I know but I'm always amazed at how well the outdoor screens in Times Square, Shibuya Crossing, etc... do in the day.
The 2 screens on the top left in this image (https://mediaim.expedia.com/destination/1/7b3980b3f80540d120...) have no trouble displaying bright white or other colors in the midday sun. (note: that photo itself looks edited, over saturated, high contrast) but those displays look great in person.
They have HUGE pixels so they can crank the brightness while still being able to cool them. The ”just“ use LED matrices. It‘s almost completely different from how normal displays work.
Separating the power-bits* from the light-emitting bits (even just to have them on opposite sides of a PCB) lets each of these bits dissipate more heat.
The nature of their use (where we only generally pay close attention to huge outdoor screens occasionally) also has lets the big, bright outdoor displays get away with artifacts (like sometimes-noticeable scanlines, or terrible color gamut) that just won't fly on a TV that is meant to be watched day after day -- by the same small group of people -- for years.
(*No, OLEDs don't switch themselves on and off; they're still just diodes like other LEDs are. There's transistors integrated into the panel to do that part.)
It’s different, but I wouldn’t say “It‘s almost completely different”. It’s like comparing a marine diesel to a diesel car engine. It’s different but it’s still the same principle.
Perhaps so. In terms of engines, the relative scale certainly emphasizes the point (we all know about how big car engines and OLED screens are, but it's hard to comprehend the vastness of a big marine diesel engine even while standing inside of one on a ladder).
One has transistors that can't really be seen with the human eye (TFTs), and the other has transistors in SMD packages that can not only be seen, but also kicked and replaced when needed.
And one has tiny [O]LEDs that are integrated tightly together into one unit (which must be replaced at one time in the event of a pixel failure). The other has relatively enormous PCB-mount LEDs (which can be serviced individually on a bench by a tech of sufficient skill), which in turn are mounted on modules that can be swapped by a field tech fairly rapidly.
They're very different in construction methods, just as car engines are different compared to big marine engines. They'd also appear rather similar in function if one were to draw a block diagram of each.
For a junior display, you can have some guys with hand tools swap out broken modules in a giant outdoor display, but doing the same kind of repair stuck pixels in a few thousand living-room screens is a no-go.
That changes the trade-offs in terms of performance versus expected lifetime.
Even at high-quality display, B&W e-ink offers 2--4 Hz refresh, and can offer ~16 Hz or better in "X-Mode" display. I won't pretend that's great video quality, but it is possible to view animations or videos using it.
There are higher-refresh displays as well. This one advertises 60 Hz refresh and colour (it's not clear whether colour can drive at 60 Hz).
It's true that some colour displays currently run slower.
There's also an "e-paper" technology, based on LCD, which offers far higher refresh and AFAIU no ghosting.
(I've been using an e-ink tablet for the past 3+ years, and frankly love it.)
And yes, I'll also freely admit that e-ink is better tuned to less-active text displays. That said, it absolutely can refresh multiple times per minute if necessary, and that's sufficient for quite a number of display applications.
Those look like a blurry mess when you put video on them. "Possible" is not good enough.
With black and white you can probably get a clean frame change in a second. With color, if you want it to look good it's going to take a long time to swap images.
And even then the people you're trying to impress will not like the whole screen flashing when it clears ghosts.
> There's also an "e-paper" technology, based on LCD
That's just a marketing name. It's worth talking about but pretty separately. And if you want color the brightness is going to be awful.
Your original claim was that e-ink displays are incapable of "multiple frames per minute". Even allowing for hyperbole, that's simply not true, and it's well past time we retired that very tired meme.
Fact is that e-ink delivers acceptable multi-Hz update capabilities. I've used one such device (Onyx BOOX Max Lumi, with E INK Mobius and Carta HD display). I use it for interactive applications, animations, and video regularly. Yes, it's advisable to change the display mode, but at anything but the highest display quality, most animations are tolerable. Not ideal, but tolerable.
And you don't have to take my word for it, there are numerous reviews and videos showing performance.
And if you're specifically designing applications or use-cases for the devices capabilities, you can do far better than that. Which would include frequent updates. Appropriate use of technology means playing to strengths, and e-ink has numerous capabilities emissive displays simply cannot match which I've discussed previously, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396797>.
For a large-format display application you absolutely can have frequent updates. More than once a minute is trivial, and as often as several times a second involves very few distractions or compromises.
No, you're not going to prefer e-ink for gaming or as your principle display for streaming video over an OLED or similar monitor. But both of those uses are reasonably within achievable capabilities of products shipped years ago.
"Gaming on e-ink" turns up numerous demos. No, it's not what you'd get on a gaming rig, but despite everything you've said and doubled-down on, it is possible:
Similarly, that gaming rig doesn't do so hot in direct sunlight, persisting display, or low-power consumption. Each tech has its strengths and weaknesses.
The distinction between "E Ink" and "E Paper" is made because they're both extant shipping technologies, similar in some regards but based on distinct and different processes, and with different display capabilities. Accuracy, truth, and distinctions all matter.
> Your original claim was that e-ink displays are incapable of "multiple frames per minute".
In the context of a color display, getting good brightness, and not tolerating visible artifacts, I stand by that claim.
Compromising on some of those lets you go a lot faster. But it's also a lot less impressive to look at. You lose the advantages over a bright (by TV standards) TV.
The differences in brightness and speed are already strong in black and white, but when you bring in e-ink variants with multiple inks per single cell the differences get extreme. The refresh rates get very slow, but the technology can manage to reflect most of the incoming light, while color LCD struggles to beat 10%.
No, they are NOT the same, either in underlying physical process or the resulting display characteristics.
E-Ink[tm] is electrophoretic, and works by migrating dark capsules across a charge gradient. That physical migration takes time, and is subject to degraded effectiveness at higher response speeds. This is why e-ink display quality increases with slower responses, and decreases with faster responses, giving a fundamental trade-off. Even given this, it's possible to drive e-ink at 16--60 Hz, and I've definitely seen the lower end myself. With only a slight degradation in display quality (slight ghosting), multi-Hz refresh is possible (roughly 4-8 Hz in my estimation). I've used that extensively.
E-Paper, a term I'm only recently acquainted with, is based on transflective LCD (liquid crystal display) technology. That's a distinct process in which the polarisation of a crystal matrix is directly manipulated under an applied current, which is an electronic process and correspondingly much more rapid and reliable than electrophoretic transitions. A key difference is that whilst the image on an e-ink display will persist indefinitely without power, an LCD screen requires constant, though low, power. "Transflective" means that the background layer can either reflect incident light (e.g., under bright indoor or outdoor sunlight conditions) or transmit a background light.
LCD response times range from ~60 Hz (16 millisecond) to 180 Hz (5 millisecond). There may be a slight decay time to the display, again, I've not seen large tablet-style displays, though the basic technology is the same as has been used in digital watches for decades, also the OLPC (one laptop per child) project launched in 2005, 19 years ago, and the Pebble smart watch. It's a mature technology.
The principle relative drawbacks of E-Paper relative to E-Ink are probably greater power consumption (though still lower than emissive displays), a narrower field of view (due to the top polarising layer), and difficulty viewing through polarised sunglasses for those wearing them. I suspect that the overall contrast of E-Paper is low (given the polarising filter which blocks half the incident or transmitted light, one source gives a 30:1 contrast: <https://www.newvisiondisplay.com/transflective-lcds/>), though E-Ink has a similar issue. Advantages are going to be faster response and no ghosting.
Color E-Paper probably has similar low-saturation properties to e-ink. You're not going to get vivid colour, but you can probably get some colour distinction in a desaturated / pastel appearance.
For large displays of the type suggested by TFA, E-Paper should be reasonably well suited, particularly in strongly-backlit transparent displays (e.g., windows or similar panels), and where mains power is directly available. Rapid and/or continuous updates (up to 180 Hz), for scrolling, animation, video, or other updates) would be readily supported.
Both E-Ink and E-Paper would be well-suited to daylit greyscale or multicolour (though generally not true-colour) displays, updating as much as a few times per second to every few seconds, suitable for largely textual / graphic displays without extensive animation or video.
Title, description, and several images in the beginning of the video say it is. It's not until 8:52 that he says it's not and describes how it's different. Easy mistake to make.
I agree that those are all set up to confuse the viewer, but I will point out that they call it "e-paper" and the images and the top of the description talk about it competing with "e-ink".
The TV industry is always looking for the next thing to make people upgrade. Remember 3D TV? Very much the metaverse of its era; a solution in search of a problem. Quietly largely forgotten about afterwards.
I'm not sure it was really a solution in search of a problem but it was a bit gimicky and there was very little content created to really take advantage of it. (Still have one--along with about five Blu-Ray titles that use it :-))
While transparent displays are potentially useful for certain applications like digital signage, art, etc, they have major shortcomings as televisions or home theater displays - and these issues aren't expected to be sufficiently fixed anytime in the foreseeable future. Non-transparent displays will continue to be substantially better and cheaper for media consumption.
The media calling these "Transparent TVs" instead of "Transparent Displays" is inaccurate and doing a disservice to both their readers and the devices.
When I was a child I was convinced the future would contain transparent monitors. I loved the way they looked in VGHS. The day I found out they can only get as dark as the surface behind them destroyed me...
I have a transparent clock I inherited from the previous tenet, Looks great, completely unreadable on whatever surface I put it on. I suspect I will leave it for the next tenant.
Honestly I am a bit impressed, I am not sure I could have designed a clock face that is simultaneously too dark on a dark background and too light on a light background.
"I can hear something but I don't see anything." Luke squinted up at the twin suns. "3PO, help me get this little R2 unit inside where it's dark. Maybe I'll be able to see the hologram in there."
Because they go to internet forums and see endless number of people going 'omg, transparent TV is so sci-fi, why don't we have it', just like they did with the 3d fad 10 years ago.
rtings just posted a video today about how LCD televisions with thin bezels WILL develop problems.
They went out of their way to say this is NOT because the televisions are inexpensive. It is a design decision. Samsung response was basically a non answer. These companies don’t care about the longevity of their products. They will happily sell whatever sells the best.
And if televisions break every three years, that’s good for business I guess?
Edge-lit is first and foremost a cost-cutting design. It allowed the thin-craze to advance significantly but edge-lit is also used where thinness isn't prioritized. Because it is primarily the cheapest design they've been able to come up with.
So I'm not quite sure about the comment that "it is not because the televisions are inexpensive".
The problem seems to be heat, and edge-lit concentrates heat along the (small) light source. Better materials, bigger heatsinks etc. can combat this but since cost was the driving factor that negates the entire existence of the edge-lit display.
And I'm not sure about thin bezels? They are talking about thickness, no?
I have a $4500 LG OLED thin TV that is 2 years old and broken
The screen has had lines for a while, annoying, but not critical. Now there’s a power issue where it powers off in a few minutes
Now, this is out of warranty, and, it turns out, the 2 LG repair locations in the Seattle area no longer do TVs
LG know this is a problem - they are currently sending parts, and there’s a West Coast LG repair guy who will come and fix it when the parts arrive
A 4K $4k TV that isn’t that old and is almost un repairable is crazy
Anything with some exotic screen is going to cost more money and be harder to fix - pay for the extended warranty!
Note - my credit card has automatic extended warranty, but I need a quote for fixing the item, and there are absolutely no authorized repair people within 500 miles of Seattle to even get that!
Ha! I paid for one on a pickup truck. When it needed something, I sent in the 12 documents required to make a claim. They returned it, with a letter saying 'you forgot the thirteenth double-secret document we didn't say you needed to send'. I gave up.
I've got a dumb Insignia TV that I think is getting ready to celebrate it's sweet 16! It's old, its heavy (I had to buy the TV mount that is typically for much larger TV's) but it survives and because its big they actually put larger audio drivers in there and it sounds fine without a sound bar.
Meanwhile another Insignia TV I bought more recently started getting dead pixels a couple days after the warranty expired...
There's no hiding the need for companies to condition consumers to understand that purchasing a top-shelf item is not supposed to be about investing in long-lasting quality any more. That's so 20th century.
To consume as directed you need to enjoy the most luxurious product you can get for your top-dollar, if you can afford it, with confidence that the features are at least on par with the modern bargain alternatives. That's a fairly definite bar when it comes to disposability/non-repairability, but engineering-to-specifications can adapt by being informed from experience with lesser models.
Don't worry, they really are intended to last as long as the cheapest crummiest models on the average.
What is shit concept. As tech becomes more varied repairs will become more of a project instead of a process. I mean repairs will be more expensive and less likely to succeed (I think this will be offset by decreasing prices and wider parts availability).
Think about how many fields are already screwed over to the point of demanding legal protections for repairing their own stuff. Somehow Nebraska farmers and New York smartphone repair companies teamed up to push right to repair.
Somehow we need to bake this decentralized model of repair into our culture. If you can find "authorized repair people" in Seattle, then I certainly won't find them in Omaha. If parts are available I would certainly try repairs on my own. I recently fixed a kindle, and replaced a few phone screens, I built a 3d printer from parts, maybe I could fix a TV if the manufacturer doesn't actively stand in the way.
Of course not, but I don't believe most people I am friends with (or family) spend time really looking into products before they buy. Maybe a car or something? But a TV? When you can get them for $200-$300 at Walmart? Unlikely, unfortunately. So, that business model still works.
I realize my very small social bubble is not remotely large enough for an actual population sample, but I feel like it's just common sense. Things like Temu exist because this is a very common way of thinking.
Pretty much everybody replacing a TV that only lasted three years will choose a different brand next time. Making things that don't last is a good way to destroy the value of a brand
From an executives perspective is they don't destroy the brand for short term gains, the next guy probably will. So why shouldn't they be the one to benefit?
I'm torn. Yes, this should be focused on. Ideally, things get better.
But things are better. Sure televisions have a shorter life span. They are also absurdly cheaper than they have ever been. To not ack that the lower cost options are, at large, what we are complaining about hits me the wrong way.
The point was: they are cheaper per size. You can either get LCD TVs at the price of a CRT that are much larger than a CRT of the same price, or a LCD TV at the size of a CRT which is much cheaper than the same-sized CRT.
No. The requirement of having a massive vacuum tube has already put you over a modern LCD when you look at cost of goods, shipping (bigger boxes), stocking, etc. There's no way. If you bend and twist and spindle the definition of "CRT" until you've got something that can compete just to win the argument you'll find that you've created something that no normal person would recognize as a "CRT".
Technology is not a magic force that just ambiently shrinks everything. The resulting products have to correspond to real configuration of atoms that can be really manufactured and really sold in the real world. The base specifications for what you need to A: have a vacuum chamber that B: doesn't mind being constantly bombarded by electrons and the resulting radiation for decades at a time is not something that is going to magically get to a one-inch depth for a 60-inch TV.
I want to see the math for creating an electron gun that can blast phospors on a screen a foot away that is 70 inches wide and flat. That big space in most CRTs let the math be simple for how the electron gun emitted electrons. If the gun had a narrow angle to the screen (small screens or deeper backing), then the screen could be slightly curved and t just needed to be a grid coming out of the gun. To visualize this on imagine if you following the curve of CRT screens up and down then left and right, eventually it would make a sphere around the electron gun.
But towards the end of CRTs there were flat screens, not thin CRTs, but things that were clearly a CRT but with a non-curved screen. To make this happen the electron gun needed to perform a distortion on the scan lines that would account for this.
In theory the gun could be moved closer and closer to the screen and the math adjusted to be correct at any distance. But the further towards the edge of the screen a pixel was the more precise the gun would need to be to hit the right spot and the fewed trick filters and gratings on the screen itself could do. Clearly 70 inches inches practical for an in home CRT, but I think it is fun to think about.
They are higher cost than what? My point was that televisions, as a category, have absolutely plummeted in costs. It is laughable how much they have fallen. When we moved into our first house, we kept a few nice CRTs because we thought they would make good extras for the house. By the time we admitted that they were silly, a replacement panel was barely $100 and nobody was accepting the CRT for resale.
I would be interested in knowing how much harder it is to recycle these new panels. And what the environmental impact of producing them is. I would not be at all shocked to know that the effort that goes into making them lowers both of those metrics. I would be shocked if it is dramatic.
> I would be interested in knowing how much harder it is to recycle these new panels.
I actually had a hard time finding a place to actually take my last LCD TV for recycling. It was 55", but the local recycler only took LCDs up to 50" in size. They suggested going to Best Buy or other places as they took TVs up to I think 70" or something. But the people at the Best Buy nearby didn't understand me wanting to recycle the TV, they kept asking why I didn't just throw it in the trash. They ultimately wanted to charge me something like $40 to take the TV for recycling.
This is the exact run-around we got for our 27" CRT. I think they were charging more to take it for recycling, oddly. Flat didn't accept it for landfill.
I find the ‘future tech’ framing of this confusing. These have been available as commercial displays for at least 8 years, albeit with some availability issues on and off as the mfrs retool and reconsider the packaging. I just worked on a project that uses these as the windows of an augmented reality bus tour.
The article also fails to mention transparent LCD, which is a closely related cousin with inverse properties: where transparent OLED is emissive and is transparent where it receives black signal, transparent LCD is non-emissive (needs a backlight) and is transparent where the signal is white and opaque to a greater or lesser degree where the signal is black.
Naive question here: would not it be possible, and immensely cheaper, to achieve the same effect by having a horizontal screen that projects light at an angle over a vertical frame? Kind of like the good old slide projectors? With powerful LEDs like we have today and the right geometry it kind of sounds achievable to me.
It's quite possible. The Hogwarts Express ride at Universal Studios uses that trick to project onto the windows that face the corridor.[1] They're projecting onto frosted glass at low-rez.
A high-rez version is used for what stage people call "holograms". They're not really holograms, just flat projections on a mesh scrim. The projectors operate at a sharp angle and are placed above or below, and close to, the scrim.[2] That way, the excess light goes into the floor or the ceiling, rather than illuminating what's behind the scrim, which spoils the effect. This works in settings where you have total control over staging, lighting and backdrops. Like this.[3]
Projectors have limitations to begin with. And this idea takes all of those limitations, and adds even more inefficiency to them.
A major hurdle in projection that still remains today is brightness.
A projection screen that offers 50% optical transparency throws away at least 50% of the light energy that hits it: Of all the light being directed towards that screen to produce an image, no more than half of it can be reflected.
And furthermore, a screen with 50% transparency doesn't look very transparent at all. A hypothetical frosted screen that is suitable for projection with 50% reflection and 50% transmission might not look even a tiny bit like a window.
In short-term visual effects for stagecraft and amusements, that's not a big deal. "Oh, we lose fifty or sixty or ninety percent of the light we project for this effect? No worries; we'll just use a bigger, brighter projector until the effect works. Call Andy over at the rental house and see what he can get for us."
But in long-term use, that kind of built-in inefficiency is mostly a non-starter: It's inefficient to over-build the equipment in this way, and it's inefficient to burn (waste) the energy to keep it going.
Maybe with some massive improvements in material science we can have a semi-transparent screen that concurrently reflects and transmits light over-unity, but we're not there yet. But to hazard a guess, it's probably easier to accelerate a mass beyond the speed of light than to pull off that particular trick.
(Meanwhile, see-through/transparent LED-based displays with decent-ish optical transmission? Whether good or bad, that technology seems to be right around the corner.)
It's not that bad actually, energy wise. The 4k TV power consumption is about half of this projector. Any typical projectors using bulbs are more power hungry.
So TV < laser < bulb. The short throw design doesn't seem to change the numbers much.
Super excited on what this means for Mixed Reality tech by extension. Right now Optical see-through AR glasses can show information via a mirror / transparent screen. It's additive so, similar to a projector cannot show things darker than the background. Display See-through can and can thus achieve photorealism, but screen infront of face is a usability hurdle. Hope to see this tech combine the strengths of both by allowin a switch between optical see through and video see through.
Call me cynical but I never once looked at a tv and went “I wish I could see through this”.
I can see attractions in restaurants, shops, theme parks, airports, museums, etc but does it matter to consumers other than fancy picture frames/screen savers and showing the weather?
What if the image or text I’m looking at blends in with the color or texture of the real background? That wouldn’t matter commercially where displayed media is more controlled by the owner, but in a house you’re viewing casually.
See through it? Nah, but wish it wasn’t there? All the time. Always hated how TVs ruin a room. However, I don’t think this really solves the problem, for all the reasons others in this thread mention.
If they could build them into the wall, this should mostly eliminate the issue I think. Then you could show an image of whatever you want on them when you're not watching anything: a view of the outside, an image that just looks like the rest of the wall, etc.
Well yeah, I wasn't talking about transparent TVs here, just the complaint that contemporary TVs ruin the look of a room.
For transparent TVs, I don't see how those are useful at all, except as a novelty or for retail advertising or the like. If they could be transparent when turned off, and then when powered on show an image that looks as good as a normal TV, then I could see the appeal, but (AFAICT) that's not how they work.
No, window is for looking outside and seeing the world, people and nature, TV / monitor for digital content which is at best a shallow replacement of the above.
If your place has horrible views I suggest to move to a better one, not create some alternative dystopian reality for yourself. But maybe I am just getting old.
It's neat tech, I wonder what the adoption curve will look like and what the price premium will be.
TVs are so predominant in our lives that room layouts and furniture are often designed around their presence. For example, the main TV in our house sits in a sort of built-in entertainment center/cabinetry. Making it transparent would be of no benefit. Also, many times people are hiding set-top boxes or media servers (and cables) behind the TV. Now those things need an aesthetically pleasing place to live, and cable management becomes 100x more important.
I can see applications for these, but it is going to require designing around them for maximum benefit. That will slow the adoption curve, which slows the price drops, perhaps keeping them in a niche segment for a long time.
How old are you? I’m in mid 30s and half of my friends do not own TVs. I’m in Europe.
I’ve been using home cinema projector, I don’t see a point in having a TV as late millennial. I want to control what I’m watching and as dumb as the internet got in the last years tv is 100 times dumber. 15 years ago we at last had Discovery Channel or MTV.
A projector is more fiddly than a TV to set up. You need both a smooth, blank light wall and also a place to perch your projector which is just the right distance away from said wall (based on the projector's throw) and at the correct height and ideally centered to the viewing area - and with power within reach.
> which is just the right distance away from said wall (based on the projector's throw) and at the correct height and ideally centered to the viewing area
I bought a relatively cheap one around a decade ago, and this is adjustable on the projector itself. It's not nearly as difficult as you make it sound.
As long as you aren't particularly OCD about getting it to look perfect, keystoning, zoom, etc all work together to make it pretty flexible. We throw it on a variety of walls around the house (helps that white is the default wall color for home sales nowadays).
Same, a lot of my friends don't have tvs. But the houses are still often designed to have one. Probably 3/4s of my friends live in furnished rentals and those usually do have tvs, however.
The projector is irrelevant unless you can rule out all ambient light - and you can't because the screen/projector themselves will contribute to it. This is an inherent problem because the screen needs to be reflective otherwise it won't show your projected image but if it is reflective then the base black level will also be far from zero. Emissive displays don't have this problem because you can increase the emissive brightness without raising the black level and even LCD screens do better because you can increase the ratio between the two with better LCD tech.
> This is an inherent problem because the screen needs to be reflective otherwise it won't show your projected image but if it is reflective then the base black level will also be far from zero.
Screens (ALR) for these projectors only reflect from a single direction (down) and are less reflection than a standard TV screen (which are generally gloss screens) from other directions. That is, both in personal experience and in reviews, they are generally considered equal to high quality LCDs in contrast and in color.
Their main detraction from using as a display is that they are big and are generally paired with large (>100") screens.
I can't imagine this catching on for personal use. It's a flashy toy for a marketing screen. If they try to convince home users that it's the next big thing they're going to have another 3D TV on their hands.
Exactly, so many homes are designed with at least one room in the house to be tv-centric. Maybe new constructions can taken better advantage of these tvs. It would be fascinating if the same device that caused designs to center around itself then, now shift that design to something else.
I can see it working for glass houses that need to occasionally need a TV (think really rich people with overzealous architects). The cooking problem is situational and not always an issue for every window.
I would instead love E-shades to be a thing instead, I'm still waiting to press a button to make my windows go dark.
I’ve only seen samples for sale, and any sort of large scale installation is “contact us, we might have something.” I’ll just stick with Lutron until suppliers get their act together.
Then you'd have ZERO natural lighting in your house. Far more realistic is using them in lieu of traditional "paintings" though outside of Samsung Frame - most of them have poor viewing angles and are glossy which destroys the illusion.
> TVs are so predominant in our lives that room layouts and furniture are often designed around their presence
I hate this and had to fight my designer about hiding the TV. (We compromised on hiding cabling behind the wall, flush mounting and putting it in the basement.)
Transparent touch screens are a big thing in many sci-fi tv shows. The set designers have no clue about usability. Seeing the background through my monitor would be the worst thing ever (is this the button? Oh no, it's my dog).
You know how you get nice augmented reality? This is how you get nice augmented reality. This gets interesting when you look at building it into windshields/visors/lenses/etc.
Having opaque pixels would be awesome though. Current waveguide displays like the hololens and magic leap can only display light, not darkness, which is a deal breaker for most content.
Passthrough is the lazy solution for now, but requires an insane amount of over-engineering. Something always feels off, even with the overkill hardware of the Apple vision pro.
I'm looking forward to reading other HN users complaining about always-on ads that are easily blocked with an ad-blocker, and then when I ask them why they don't use an ad-blocker, they give me a lecture about how it's evil and immoral to block ads.
You'll have to explain how you installed an ad-blocker on your TV (not "in the browser that you're using because you're using this as a computer monitor", on the actual TV, being used as a modern smart TV)
Well personally, it wasn't that hard for me: I have an Android TV, so I just installed the SmartTube app. (This wasn't that easy because you have to side-load the APK, but that's not difficult if you can follow some instructions on a web page.)
Of course, if Android TVs with user-loaded apps go away and everyone has a locked-down Apple TV, it'll be more difficult and you'd have to block ads at the router level, but for now I'm not too worried about it. Google obviously likes the Android TV approach or else they wouldn't be supporting it as they do, and after all this time they don't seem interested in trying to lock it down the way iOS is.
It's effectively the same thing. If it weren't for the ads, I wouldn't have bothered looking for an alternative YouTube viewing client. The client's biggest feature (and reason for existence) is not showing the ads. It has some other nice features too: one is the addition of SponsorBlock, which of course is just another form of ad-blocking.
> I'm looking forward to reading other HN users complaining about always-on ads that are easily blocked with an ad-blocker, and then when I ask them why they don't use an ad-blocker, they give me a lecture about how it's evil and immoral to block ads.
Turns out: you don't use an ad-blocker either. Next time, just tell people to use a different app, and tell them which one you use. Most folks know about that option. That option isn't particularly challenging or hard or immoral or objectionable in any way: if it's on the play store, it's sanctioned by Google.
But installing an ad-blocker is hard. I don't know of any that exist that work for TVs (not just "the youtube Android app"). Do you?
(Because the only way I know how to block ads on a TV is to still not "install an ad-blocker" but to connect the TV to the internet through a proxy that kills off all named and bare IP requests for known ad servers, like a pi-hole. Which is well beyond what many people care to bother with for their TV)
>That option isn't particularly challenging or hard or immoral or objectionable in any way: if it's on the play store, it's sanctioned by Google.
You seem to be missing something here. Alternative YouTube viewing clients are NOT on the Google Play store, and Google hates them. You have to install them from APKs or alternative stores. For my Android TV, I had to install SmartTube from an APK using a separate "downloader" app that I had to point to the project's Gitlab/hub page. Not too hard for an IT person, but I wouldn't expect a non-technical person to do this. Installing uBO on Firefox/Chrome is vastly easier.
>I don't know of any that exist that work for TVs (not just "the youtube Android app"). Do you?
No, just like I don't know any non-Google YouTube viewer apps available on the Play store.
Yeah, my Android TV has this, but honestly it's not nearly annoying enough for me to bother doing anything about. They're just simple soundless, still-picture ads for some new TV show. I only see them briefly before I select the SmartTube or Jellyfin app. They're nothing at all like YouTube ads, which are horribly annoying video ads that randomly pop up while you're watching something and can't be skipped.
Wait until mandatory DNS over HTTPS with certificate pinning, embedded in the browser view is a thing everywhere. At least in the Google world, we are in a slowly boiled frog situation.
The thing I’m most worried about is manufacturers embedding a SIM to bypass my network. My current approach is no network on the vast majority of TVs (Samsung) and an Apple TV as the only connected device.
Probably. Even tiny amount of data per month would allow them to store new local ads and do firmware updates without consent to ruin a TV that was acceptable when purchased. They can wait until after the return window to roll them out. They could do a lot of the content detection on device and just send back the result.
Adding a cellular radio and antenna will add a lot of cost to the BOM, and even worse, having to pay a cellular provider for service will add even more cost. Since most people happily connect their TV to their WiFi anyway, this would only catch the rare people who don't or refuse, and those people are unlikely to respond well to ads anyway, so I don't see mfgrs paying all this money just to annoy the small subset of users who hate ads this much.
Yes, kind of. Cars do this for sure. Pretty much all data about your car, plus all your texts and whatnot, are sent over the cellular network. They've been doing it since 2G days, too.
Definitely not, browser extensions like U-block origin are much better because they have the context of the browser and DOM access. So ads aren't just cut out, but the space where the ads would be are too. So no white blocks stopping your reading or ":( can't display this ad" nonsense.
Cool strawman. I got no problems denying mfgs their ad revenue by using an Apple TV. But I’ll complain on behalf of the non-HNers who should have an ad-free choice by default.
The ads are coming for all of us. Apple is starting to insert their promos in Apple TV too. There’s no premium option that won’t eventually succumb to the need for moar revenue.
My company tested these transparent OLEDS or TOLEDS to deploy in our venues. It may seem like this is a gimmick, but it's transformative in digital interaction. Let me share a thought experiment. Have you ever been to a sports bar where there are TVs just everywhere and it's great when there's a big game but a huge distraction otherwise? TOLEDS do an incredible job at solving this and allow for some super awesome integration. For example, what if your bar counter had a glass top that could also double as a screen for you to use (Yes they can be touchscreen as well and only accept inputs from designated areas if needed).
I think the big thing here is also allows for transparency with objects and can be great for way finding or augmentation and disappear when not needed.
Oh, MicroLEDs! Because of the real-world problems with PC-monitor-sized-and-density OLED screens I've been waiting for PC monitors with these pixels to become available for mere mortals to purchase for a long while now.
They've been like five years away for five-to-ten years now, and that fact is very sad.
Everything i'm going to say here is conjecture, but I don't believe that market pressures have allowed for much innovation in the high-quality PC monitor space. In the last 5-8 years we have seen the disappearance of small economical 4k high-quality monitors for example, because gamers are buying low-quality but fast refresh monitors on the high end, and pretty much everything else is a race to the bottom when it comes to cost - office computers. The price of 24" 4k and up non-gaming monitors (with decent backlights) has gone up, 27" is now the smallest you can expect to find, and there is no market for high-quality workstation monitors outside of Apple's products. See also the disappearance of 12-13" 4k laptops.
Man that’s crazy from the perspective of wires and transistors. The Expanse sci fi series television show always had pretty good demonstrations of tech to me, and this is queuing up those gadgets, cool!
Transparent screens doesn’t make much sense for consumer TVs (I know the article indeed points to other use-cases). You still need a black background to facilitate display of black content.
[W]ho wants to see their bookshelves showing through in the background while they’re watching Dune? That’s why the transparent OLED TV LG demonstrated at CES 2024 included a “contrast layer”—basically, a black cloth—that unrolls and covers the back of the display on demand.
I'm more likely to get a Samsung Art series than this. I was in an AirBnB which had one and it really did take me 30min to appreciate I was looking at a display, because the schtick of a pictureframe and subconsciously assuming it's a rather vivid print of the great wave .. until you double-take because now it's a van gogh picture.
Something like a window that displays an unobtrusive temperature or forecast could be nice. But I can't imagine the market for that is huge compared to the market for TVs. Plus, windows put in place stay in place for decades, so it's a support nightmare, no chance to sell upgrades, etc.
Another option would be bathroom mirrors displaying news / forecast, which is something hobbyists already implement with one-way mirrors and normal LCD displays hidden behind. At least conceptually, mirrors could become a piece of tech you "upgrade" every 2-5 years. But again, how big is that market?
It could be an alternative to automotive displays. That's a big market, and it would probably look and work better than these "mirror" HUDs you can find in some vehicles today.
I can see this working in a glass house, which aren't that uncommon...some new buildings really go on maximizing window space on a skyscraper so that you don't really have a wall on the exterior (more common in China than the USA for sure). See for example:
Housing is in short supply and rents are higher than what many can afford.
Enter the ad-subsidized rental.
You can now afford a one-bedroom shoebox in a gleaming post-modernist glass tower downtown in exchange for being exposed to streaming ads on all your windows 24 hours a day. These condos have a lot of windows.
Housing crisis solved, and the market of poors is constantly exapanding so even if margins are slim it can be made up for in volume. Win-win.
Does that matter? These displays don't seem to be able to control the transparency but instead only the light emitted. So black ends up as "transparent" and everything else ends up as transparent but with a bright light in front.
I'd like one of these for my wall mounted TV in the living room. It would be much nicer without the "black mirror" effect in what is an otherwise bright and colorful space.
A much cheaper solution would be to have an array of accurate ambient light/colour sensors and have the TV mimic the colour of your wall. So long as the TV had near-perfect viewing angles, the result would be very reasonable.
As someone with a Frame TV, don't get one. I have one because my wife really wanted it (and still wants to keep it), but I hate it. The software is designed with this weird "must keep content going at all times" mentality where it will switch inputs (usually to the antenna) if you turn off whatever is connected to the current input. The TV turns itself on and starts playing content for no reason sometimes. The remote doesn't work half the time. And it has the advertising on the home screen everyone knows and hates from Samsung.
It is the worst TV I have ever owned, by a large margin. One of these days I'm probably going to stab it from sheer frustration. The only reason it hasn't long since been replaced is because my wife likes it.
I bet the better way to install one of these is suspending it from ceiling joists instead of trying to land the mounting hardware on wall studs in the 1/2" strip where you can't see it.
Or redesign your living room to include a glass wall like it's a fancy shower, and you can glue the TV to it.
Retail space seems like most obvious use case. Your malls and even street level shops could show advertising, sale prices and so on... Not possibly most horrid or offensive use...
No need for cameras outside to report what's going on to you inside, you can see through.
HUD (E.G: for cars), augmented reality on phones, monitoring for things like patients, babies...
If they manage to deal with the ambient luminosity problem, it can even change the architecture of your room. No more big screens, just windows letting light in, that you can switch to displays when you like.
Even for class room it's better: students will be visible behind their screens to the teacher.
One usecase that occures to me, is a very larhe transparent screen in front of a stage at a conference with the presenter standing behind their presentation...
Those already exist. They build it into the dash and reflect it off the window which puts it out in front so you don't have to shift your focus so close to see it.
Holy shit, this is such cool technology! To be honest, the progress in display tech in the last twenty years is mind-boggling. Stuff I never dreamed of is now common place. So far the most amazing thing was curved screens and bendable displays. Now transparent displays!
Great now can we "layer" a bunch of these to make a fishtank sized thing that you sit around perched on your coffee table to watch sports in 3D without all that glasses nonsense? More like sitting in the best seats in the stand.
Commenters here are really hung up on the "transparent TV in my living room" use case, but the article goes out of its way to point out that's not really what these displays are for, especially given the prices.
The use-cases presented are:
* Teleprompter-like screen with a camera behind it allowing presenter to look straight into the camera while still seeing the screen.
* Windows in public areas (subway cars, elevators) that display advertisements or animations.
I love the tech but these things are going to be obnoxious as hell. I hope it supercharges the movement to ban advertisements from public places, which has already been done successfully in Sao Paulo and several other major cities [1]. The 99% Invisible episode on it is worth a listen [2].
Many years ago São Paulo heavily regulated outdoor ads [1]. It was a huge leap in quality of life for the citizens - the removal of all that visual noise and the sudden reappearance of the underlying architecture unveiled a beauty most inhabitants didn't remember existed.
It got to the point that, when I visited New York, I got angry at the full-on sensorial assault. My mood was always nasty there.
If this is done responsibly, and used to extend architecture in ways it wouldn't be feasible before, I don't have many reasons to be concerned. OTOH, in places where visual pollution is unregulated, oh boy, it'll be bad.
Probably, but we'll probably get used to it just like graphics on windows or displays behind windows / store front displays. Sci-fi and cyberpunk visualisations have already prepared us.
First class - no ads. Second class, cheaper & ads. If it goes this way its actually great in 1 aspect - you can't escape the simple fact that ads are a garbage, and high quality of... life or your time is without them.
Seems obvious but I've met many who dont see it as sort of brain cancer and consider them harmless.
My last visit to NYC there was a pronounced uptick in wall sized LED screens being used for everything from art pieces (at the new Laguardia) to info screens to just shops with massive screens in their storefront in lieu of showing physical goods.
>* Windows in public areas (subway cars, elevators) that display advertisements or animations.
That is exactly what I said [1] when Apple reportedly killed MicroLED and people say MicroLED has no future. Quoting myself:
>Once I saw the Fully transparent MicroLED on Display in this year's CES , it is only a matter of time before it comes to market. I can immediately see luxury Retail shop paying the premium to get it.
Transparent OLED has slight colour shift and yellow tint to it. While Transparent MicroLED is really, fully transparent. The actual cost or price for these "Windows" compared to the additional space in premium Retail location are tiny. Once you have luxury started ordering and they reach a mass production scale cost will come down within a few years. ( ~2030 ).
While MicroLED may never end up in Smartphone or Tablet. I still think they have great potential elsewhere.
Minority Report had directed marketing based on eye recognition and people having to buy other people's eyes to keep out of the reach of the panopticon dystopia controlling everything - the kickass transparent screens there were definitely used for dystopic purposes.
Really it's a guns don't kill people - people kill people with guns situation; transparent screens for showing ads all the time at people don't create dystopias, but a capitalist dystopia will be using transparent screens for showing ads at people all the time if they can.
A capitalist dystopia will use anything for showing ads to people all the time if they can. Actually we're already there and have been for years. The global ad market is all about recognizing and finetuning ads to specific people, using techniques a lot more advanced than iris or facial recognition.
The ad industry will use any surface they can, but surfaces where people are already looking are especially profitable and also where ads are most annoying. With transparent displays this can and will include windows everywhere.
I guess watched very different cyberpunk movies then, since I considered them as one of the worst things showed.
If your cereal box for 2$ has endless steeam of ads or each wall has active ad panel, and so does everything else, thats fuckex up future I'd gladly pay extra to avoid, and double that for my kids. Nothing kickass about that, on contrary.
Per the parent comment, the screen isn’t problematic so much as the culture around them. The dystopic aspect is that they’re used for advertising rather than that they exist.
"Amazing" doesn't have to mean something positive; it often does involve some aspect of delight in common parlance, but it needn't always be used with that intent.
Perhaps amazingly, I myself think that waking up in a scene from Minority Report would be absolutely terrific.
Next gen public displays will follow you as you walk across the square with messaging targeted to you .. as the same is done in parallel to hundred others.
A fucking gas pump loudly playing ads nonstop on it’s screen was enough to make me feel like not enough of the world was on fire, and I hardly ever experience rage.
Ads following people around is straight up harassment and will result in lawsuits, freakouts and righteous violence.
What we have to deal with is creeping normalisation.
The majority of the human population using the internet seem to have accepted being grouped into buckets by cookies and targeted with very specific adverts .. from there it's a short hop to public space { facial | phone | device } recognition and targeted adverts.
At least in the US, you can usually press one of the buttons next to the screen (and usually it's one of the corner buttons) to mute the TV while pumping gas.
I start with the buttons on the right, because I am right handed and that's easier for me. I start with the top button and work to the bottom.
If silence has not yet been achieved, then I do the same with the buttons on the left.
If silence has still not yet been achieved, then I make a mental note to never give that location any money ever again. (It's a short list, and the irritation makes it very easy to remember each location whether I want to or not.)
(I don't worry about how "brute forcing" might be interpreted. I am doing nothing wrong.)
Wow, given what their website looks like and their claims I’m shocked that they actually had a functional prototype 4 years ago.[0]
On the one hand I’m bummed that I haven’t seen it in person, and on the other I’m so very glad it isn’t a popular technology (yet).
I’m really curious to see if anyone can find any details on how their technology works; I’m struggling to think of any better solutions than having tens of thousands of oled screens and lenses to map each pixel on the smaller screen to a pixel and an angle on the larger screen as a whole.
Weirdly appropriate company name. Imagine if the minds behind this were used for making people's lives better instead blasting them with more effective ads.
Doesn't have to get even worse than it already is.
I don't live on times square and prefer to keep it that way.
I will not roll over and take it just because it's not that much worse.
Maybe forbidding is a better idea. They may be able to pay, and in the end, it doesn't make me feel any better that the millionth annoying ad at least cost a lot to show. Corporations have deep pockets.
Given the price, I don't know if replacing subway car windows and elevators with $4500 screens would pencil out. But you know, that's probably just me wishing there can be one single two dimensional surface without an advertisement on it.
It's gonna become cheaper over time, just how there are already screens showing ads everywhere, which you'd never expect when the television first got popular.
Zero tactile feedback, expensive and difficult-to-repair controls on a machine operated in a dirty environment where people usually wear gloves? I wonder how many of the people who designed that have actually used an excavator or talked to someone who does, or even just visited a construction site to experience the environment.
There's plenty of discussions on how touchscreens in cars are awful, but those who design these abominations are so out of touch with reality that they don't seem to realise that. I suspect the same applies here.
Touchscreen for settings. I see "joystick fine control", and other such. Being able to setup for speed or accuracy is a good thing for me at least (custom profiles at the top of the screen).
And I'm usually not wearing gloves inside a skid steer/mini ex, unless the heater isn't working.
As a side note... It's interesting how "more advertising opportunity" is a well that never runs dry.
You would think this tops out at some point. That advertiser's won't just spend more and more forever. Turns out, they will.
Imo, this is related in a complex way to etherealization of many modern sectors. Outsourcing, specialization, the proverbial 4-hr workweek... and it's more pertinent SME instantiation.
If your business model is subscription condiments, you probably have the condiments made with your label and perhaps outsource the shipping.
The value add of the consumer facing firm is all marketing. There are no investments or long term improvements to production. You have blunt tools to affect product. It's unsurprising that marketing specialists are big consumers of advertising services.
Meanwhile, modern pay-per-performance advertising represents the down-scalable starting point for nascent businesses. That shapes these firms.
Anyway... There are so many sectors where paying >20% of gross on advertising is normal. It's not obvious what the upper threshold is... especially with digital products.
There's another use case towards the end:
"Transparent displays could have a place on the desktop—not so you can see through them, but so that a camera can sit behind the display, capturing your image while you’re looking directly at the screen. This would help you maintain eye contact during a Zoom call."
Personally I think that would be a great idea. But from my (non expert) perspective, for eye contact in video calls, I'd have thought a single camera behind a transparent 30" monitor would be little better than a single camera ontop of a 30" monitor, given that you may have multiple faces on screen and have those faces in different places on screen. Maybe a matrix of cameras behind a transparent screen, with gaze detection and eye tracking to determine which to activate at any time?
> a camera can sit behind the display, capturing your image while you’re looking directly at the screen. This would help you maintain eye contact during a Zoom call.
A camera so situated would also capture the contents of the display, not just the display user’s face. Others on the call would see the transparent display user’s face occluded by the display’s output.
I remember maybe 10 years ago seeing a news article about Microsoft having developed a system that uses a camera at both the top and the bottom of a screen, which can then build a 3D model of your face and reconstruct a video in real time of what your face would look like from a virtual camera in the middle of the screen.
I remember thinking it was a massive waste of computing power. And they wanted to put it on a phone.
> Windows in public areas (subway cars, elevators) that display advertisements or animations.
I would say this is even more distressing, they are literally trying to invade every damn steradian of your field of view. Soon you won't be able to look out of a train window without ads.
Dunno, feels like not being constantly manipulated should be a more fundamental right and not just a local issue. If a person does it it's harassment. If a company does it via technology it's business as usual.
Instead they solved it much more elegantly by just live-processing the video to re-aim your pupils. They’ve been doing it for years and most people don’t even know it which is how you know they did a great job. I’ve never noticed it looking creepy or artifact-y.
I think this is great, but doesn't it hinder the ability to naturally not look in the eyes? Or were they just flaws seen in the first demos? I haven't used this kind of system.
In any case, a camera behind the screen doesn't completely solve the problem anyway, because the screen can have multiple people. For this application you need either a camera per person, or the pupil re-aiming postprocessing, to give the illusion of presence.
Samsung already sells phones where the selfie camera is under the screen. Since the screens are not (and cannot be) fully transparent, the image quality suffers.
> Teleprompter-like screen with a camera behind it allowing presenter to look straight into the camera while still seeing the screen.
Maybe they can upgrade this to a dynamic e-ink backdrop that's transparent where the camera is, along with an x,y motorized camera that can follow the position of the video window on the screen.
> Windows in public areas (subway cars, elevators) that display advertisements or animations.
I feel it's something that can be explored better in architecture settings - with this, windows can be used for lighting and decoration. It opens up a lot of interesting possibilities in both commercial and residential settings.
Disclaimer, I don't actually own a TV as of 15 years or so. I consume most of my media on laptops instead (Netflix, Youtube, etc.)
This smells the latest in series of increasingly desperate moves. We've had curved screens, 3D screens, 8K screens, etc. already. Who needs those things? Why buy an 8K TV when there's no 8K content whatsoever.
Most people put their TV in front of a wall. That's because they are kind of big and expensive and you don't want to bump into all the time. Which with an invisible by design thing would be a thing. The value of seeing the wall through the TV is very limited. On the other hand, the value of not seeing the wall when you are watching something is pretty high.
See through screens would be great for AR but AR TVs don't sound like they are going to be a thing. This makes more sense in some kind of AR goggles. I could see some limited role for them for advertising like the article suggests but beyond that not really. That would work with normal screens as well of course and would have for the last few decades. But it's still not that common.
The article mentions touchscreen huds for heavy machinery and cars, this feels like a real value proposition and not a gimmick. Also, why not have them in your home? In your bathroom mirror, everywhere?
For the bathroom mirror there are already DIY designs called "magic mirrors" using half reflective mirrors in front of a tv screen, which are immensely more cost effective than transparent screens.
Would you pay a lot for that though? You might buy that stuff if it basically costs nothing. This is being pitched as a very premium expensive thing instead. Not surprising because it probably is going to cost a lot to build the factories that produce those things.
My bathroom mirror probably cost something like 10$; I honestly don't care about seeing anything else in it than myself. That's why I have it.
