People at SIF: How to Excel in Pixels

Try to remember way back to the first TV you ever had in your living room. Now go visit a local Samsung Electronics store near you. Can you see the transformation the TV has made? It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? The technology of the TV has gone through such an overhaul that the TV has re-categorized itself from a home appliance to a must-have IT gadget. TV has, especially, made a vast technological improvement in its display and user experience, also known as UX. In the next two segments, we will sit down and talk with the guys who are behind the scenes of the innovation of TV.

For this segment, we sat down with Sinwoo Choi, Senior Engineer at the Visual Display Department. He specializes in display, especially 3D display. Since many of the Samsung Electronics latest TV features 3D display, such as UHD/OLED models, there aren’t many people better than him to talk about what goes inside the latest Samsung TV’s display. Let’s skip the small talk and get right to the point!

It is said that Ultra High Definition (UHD) TVs have a display that is 4 times better than Full HD TVs. It feels like it would be difficult for us to feel that physically. So what does that mean?

Actually, the idea of resolution being 4 times better is vague to a lot of people. Generally speaking, resolution of a TV could be divided into 2 categories: HD and SD. HD, High Definition, is often referred as Full HD. Full HD has 1920*1080 pixels. UHD has 4 times more of pixels than the Full HD, 3840*2160 pixels. Therefore, Pixel-wise, UHD has 4 times the pixels of Full HD.

The significance of the resolution density could be argued, since everyone watches TV from different distances; some people like to watch it closely and some people like to be farther away. Therefore, saying that it looks 4 times better could be subjective, however, physically and technically it is 4 times better; UHD is much clearer than Full HD.

“4 times” actually sounds like a major improvement. What kind of technological advancement allowed the innovation of the display?

Yes, it is a big improvement. However, UHD was bound to happen; it was inevitable. For example, the display screen of the TV is getting bigger by the day. This means the image is getting bigger as well. For example, the current standard TV resolution is 1920*1080 pixels. As the screen gets bigger, people started to see the pixels.

Back in the “old days,” it was hard to differentiate the resolution of a TV especially from the Optimal Viewing Distance, which is about 4~5 meters away from the TV. But the current TV screen is so big that people started to be able to differentiate the resolution from the Optimal Viewing Distance.  One of the ways that this most came into play was the visual identification of the pixel, for example.

The answer to this problem was simple; we had to create a TV with better resolution. However, first, we needed the technology to make it. We needed a TV panel that could support this high resolution. We already had some technologies available to support the higher resolution, but we wanted to go beyond just a simple ‘better’. So we started to develop other technologies to create the best TV display. We tried to do things that were never done before, thus the technologies like Micro Dimming Ultimate and Quadmatic Picture Engine. Combining pre-existing technologies with new technologies was how UHD came to reality.

What is Micro Dimming Ultimate?

Micro Dimming Ultimate is a technology applied exclusively to UHD TV. Generally, the resolution of a TV is processed as a whole. We thought the processing could be more detailed than that. What Micro Dimming Ultimate does is divides the screen into blocks of sections. All these blocks process the resolution both individually and as a whole. Each block calculates and processes the best shadow rate, color, detail and definition of the image. Obviously, with this exclusive technology that Samsung has developed, we were able to improve the quality of the picture like never before.

I heard the UHD TV can transform a Full HD image to a UHD image. How does it work?

Currently and unfortunately, there is not much purely UHD content available, because UHD is relatively a new thing. Full HD TV is the popular kind of TV right now and there i tons of content for Full HD. Knowing before-hand about the  possibility of lack of UHD content, and the fact that it could be issue in the beginning phase of UHD, we decided that we should apply Up- Scaling to the Full HD content. Up scaling means forcing a higher resolution of an image, in this case Up Scaling Full HD to UHD.

Software like Photoshop has a similar technology to ‘UpScaling’. If you force a resolution of the image, you can notice some roughness, which we call a ‘noise’. When many people say that they are developing a UHD TV, what they are doing is basically forcing the resolution, then sharpening the image to make it look clearer. However, when you do this, you still see the noise. So the image looks rough and dirty. You can also see this on regular TV when SD is upscaled to HD. ‘UpScaling’ requires the emphasis of the good parts of the image, but the problem is that it also emphasizes the bad part of the image, thus, the noise. Until recently, this was hard to avoid.

However, Samsung couldn’t have that negative point in our upscaling. UpScaling needed to make the original image look better and clearer. So we developed a technology where the TV itself can detect the noise then delete it from the image. Our basic philosophy of display is that a TV needs to analyze the original video or image to perfection. If there is a noise in the image, UpScaling doesn’t make any difference, since it can actually make an image look worse than the original. So we came up with the solution, after some intense researching. Quadmatic Picture Engine! Quadmatic Picture Engine processes the ‘upscaling’ in 4 steps. First it analyzes the original image’s characteristics, resolution and many other things. Then it detects and deletes the noise from the original image. Third, it upscales the image. And finally, it controls the detail. These four steps of Quadmatic Picture Engine are what really make the difference.

Of course you can make a true UHD out of a HD image, but with Quadmatic Picture Engine, you can get really close to it. Currently this method of upscaling is used only in Samsung TVs.

I just want to clarify that when I say “TV,” in terms of processing, I’m talking about the chip in the TV. All the processing is done by the chip in the TV. The strength of Samsung is that it produces so many things like chips, and panels as well. So it makes it easy for us to communicate and bring the best technology and product to the market.

There is only so much resolution a person can take in. I feel like for some people it can be overwhelming. What does it mean if we can no longer differentiate the resolution of a TV? What does it mean for you?

The ultimate goal of TV is to show in the same images that we see reflected in the real world. So I believe all these technologies like OLED, UHD, Curved OLED are a process of truly achieving that.

Therefore, in the end, I don’t think TV is going to be about the resolution, but rather how we can show the world as it seems. We see things in 3D in the real world. We need to project depth to do that. If you think about it, you can still see things in 3D even one of your eyes is covered. In that respect we think we can achieve showing ‘real world-like’ display through UHD and OLED.

In some sense, resolution can improve to a point where human eyes can’t recognize a difference from any distance, and I think, personally, if that days comes, TVs will be able to present objects exactly the same as they are perceived in the real world; you won’t be able differentiate a TV from reality. And when that day comes anything can become a TV such as a mirror or a refrigerator.

Sometimes TVs looks more real than the real world. What kind of research do you do?

Current technology’s limitation is that we can’t create or show ‘visible light’. Panels just can’t do that yet. We recognize that there are going to be things that an image cannot show, so what a TV needs to do is to make other things look better. Sometimes we can show things as they are and sometimes we can show things how people want to see them. Everyone perceives objects differently; there is a thing called “preferred definition” to standardize preference. There is also something called ‘memory color”. This is people’s expectation of a color, for example, someone would want yellow to look like a certain yellow or an apple to look like a certain apple. We try to make this “memory color” look better for people. In the end, it’s about how people perceive it.

We research about how humans input color or display in to their brain. Then how we can project it like in the same way that the brain perceives it. How do you find the same colors that people like? So we think about how human eye, cells, nerves and the brain.

OLED is normally used in smartphone, how is it applied to TV? What was the most challenging part of it?

We had to enlarge the technology to make it applicable to TV. Production and development-wise it was challenging. Making a panel is like making a chip. So making this complicated chip perfectly in a much bigger size was difficult to produce.

What is Curved OLED TV? It sounds like a totally new concept?

If you go to a theater to you see a movie, it feels so real. Part of the reason is because the screen is curved. When people see an object they tend to focus on one object and when they do other objects seem to get relatively out of focus. The curved display can provide the viewer an equal distance from the eyes to object on the screen, so wherever you position your eye on the screen, it is easy for the eye to recognize object. Finding the right degree of curvature was the challenge.

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