CEDIA 2022

Samsung’s MS1A is a 110” 4K micro-LED TV. It uses the same direct-view LED technology as modular, professional video walls that are used for billboards, giant video displays like you see in sports arenas, and super high-end home theaters. What Samsung has done is shrunk the LEDs to the point where 4K worth of pixels fits in a 110” screen and packaged it as a TV, no assembly required.

Making a micro-LED display is tough, every single LED, three per pixel, needs to be perfectly placed by a robot. If that sounds complex, it is. And the price of the MS1A, reflects this: It’ll set you back about $150,000. Talk about paying a premium for early adoption! But anyone who does cough up the dough will witness next-level image fidelity. With micro LED, there is nothing between you and the light-emitting diodes creating the picture. It’s like OLED in contrast, but with even higher brightness. Plus, there’s no glass in front of the screen, so there are no reflections to distract from what you see.

Because micro-LED panels are modular, it essentially consists of square tiles, the MS1A does have extremely fine seams that you might occasionally notice if you stand a few feet away, but they disappear completely at a normal viewing distance. By pre-assembling the tiles and putting them in a frame (which Samsung calls Monolith Design) it looks and acts like a giant TV. It even has built-in sound.

Samsung's Jonathan Samborski explained that "It's a 110-inch micro-LED TV that we call the Monolith design because it comes pre-assembled, where the integrator just needs to basically hang it mounted on the wall and adjust for the Z axis alignment and then calibrate for uniformity and you're pretty much ready to go. So it's the future of LED, direct view led, and it's got around a 0.63-millimeter pitch, so that makes it extremely tight fitting where you can pretty much watch it from a 10-foot distance or greater without seeing the dreaded lines or edges of the actual modules."

The performance of micro-LED is seductive. The trick is shrinking the LEDs, so they fit in a display at a size that works in a home, as opposed to in a football stadium. The MS1A achieves this milestone, it is a pricey glimpse of the future of TV technology that you can special order today.