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This story is part of CES 2016. Our editors bring you complete CES 2016 coverage and scour the showroom floor for the hottest new tech gadgets around.
How’s a transformable, dancing TV sound to you? That may just be the future, according to Samsung.
The South Korean electronics giant is showing off several far-out TVs this week at the CES trade show in Las Vegas. They’re built around the idea that a really, really large television can be made from smaller displays that seamlessly fit together.
What you get is a TV that’s much bigger than what you’d expect from current technology — like the 170-inch monster Samsung has at its booth. With all the smaller displays synced up, you can’t even see where one ends and the next begins.
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Samsung’s crazy 170-inch TV uses modules to get huge
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CES is one of the most important events for Samsung each year. The company showcases new gadgets that will hit the market in the upcoming year as well as more fanciful technology that won’t be available for a long time, if at all. Along with futuristic TVs, Samsung also displayed new wearables, like a solar-charging purse, a smart belt that keeps track of your waistline and how much you eat, and a smart suit that lets you easily exchange digital business cards.
Enlarge ImageThe Samsung TV of the future could be made up of a bunch of smaller displays, as shown at the tech giant’s CES booth in Las Vegas.
Shara Tibken/CNET
It wasn’t alone in promoting cutting-edge TV designs. Korean rival LG, for instance, had on display a flexible concept OLED display so thin, at just 0.18mm, that it can be rolled up like a poster.
In one CES setup, Samsung is showing eight displays moving around and almost dancing, as you can see in the animated GIF on this page.
The modular displays can be rotated to alter the screen ratio from 16:9 to 21:9, cutting off those annoying black bars on widescreen epics like the Lord of the Rings series. The TV jumps between the two ratios by splitting the screen into two parts, rotating them and then reassembling them in the shape you want.
“We believe the possibilities for innovation in TV are truly endless, and in the years to come, customers will experience ever greater choice and control, as the current barriers around screen size, shape and versatility are overcome,” Hyun Suk Kim, president of Samsung visual display business, said in a statement.
Samsung also had plenty to show those of us who need a TV now. Its new high-end, ultra high-definition televisions all feature the ability to serve as smart-home hubs, letting you do things like control your lights from your TV set. In addition, the company keeps making its offerings even thinner, with one TV about as slim as a Galaxy S6 smartphone.
