Drop everything you're doing … unless what you're doing is putting up a new 4K Ultra HD TV.
Samsung today unveiled a line of transparent and mirrored OLED displays that it intends to sell to retail stores for use as interactive displays. While Samsung made no specific remarks about releasing them to the public, the show floor models serve as a window into a possible future for our living rooms.
The firm showed off these new panels at Retail Asia Expo 2015, an annual event held in Hong Kong that - despite what its uninteresting name suggests - shows off some interesting new technology from Canon, Sony and Samsung.
Besides their states of opacity, the new Samsung panels come integrated with Intel Real Sense that will enable gesture control via a built-in camera. Samsung plans to roll these panels of the future out to retailers first, creating a "visually compelling, interactive closet," but could come to our homes after its commercial trial run.
While the technology isn't quite ready for the living room, a press release on Samsung's press site detailed some pretty impressive specs:
"Samsung Display's Mirror OLED display panel ... delivers at least 50 percent higher reflectance than competitive Mirror LCDs now in limited availability and a much improved colour gamut (over 100 percent vs. around 70 percent of NTSC), as well as an exceptionally high contrast ratio (over 100,000:1 vs. 4,000:1) and a much faster response time (under 1ms vs. 8ms) than LCD transparent panels.
"Compared to conventional LCD alternatives for today's digital signage market, Samsung Display's Full HD Transparent OLED display panel has a substantially higher colour gamut (100 percent vs. around 70 percent of NTSC), sharply increased transmittance (45 percent vs. around 10 percent), and better clarity through a wider range of viewing angles. It features a transparency level of over 40 percent, much higher than the 10 percent level of today's transparent LCD displays."
Better image quality, gaming-quality response time and a snazzy reflective surface? Can't wait.
