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Is Xiaomi's transparent TV the biggest design fail ever? (archive)
Many strange things have happened in 2020, so it's probably the perfect year for Chinese tech company Xiaomi to announce the world's first completely transparent TV. And if you're wondering that the point of it is, we're here to tell you that you're not alone.
Available in China from from 16 August, the snappily named Xiaomi Mi TV LUX OLED Transparent Edition will cost ¥49,999 ($7,200/£5,500), offering "an ultra-immersive viewing experience" in which "images seem to be suspended in the air". That is, we assume, as long as your TV isn't positioned against a wall.
[...] In a blog post on its website (adorned with several images of women in extravagant ballgowns standing behind transparent TVs, because why not?), Xiaomi calls the TV "a new way to consume visual content previously only seen in science fiction films". Unlike traditional TVs, the Mi TV LUX Transparent Edition "creatively embeds all the processing units in its base stand". The TV sports a 55-inch OLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate and 150000:1 static contrast ratio.
Get your transparent APNGs ready.
Also at The Verge.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ze on Sunday August 16 2020, @01:33PM (3 children)
Pretty sure some of the images and videos are fake, in particular the few that show any black content against the transparency.
Transparent + OLED (and no light-absorbing display element mentioned) should = light emission over top of whatever you see through it. No darkening (beyond the whole screen maybe having some tint).
So the transparent parts are just what should be dark/black. Actual black just shouldn't show up except over a black background or in a dark room. This is what most of the video does look like, and I think the couple parts that don't are rendered.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday August 16 2020, @02:00PM
They don't mention any of the other technical implementation details, why would you expect an opacity layer to be mentioned?
The options seem to be that either they have opacity control that they didn't bother to explicitly mention, or basically every image and video are faked, and they're looking to royally piss off anyone who buys the thing and practically guarantee they'll never sell another high-end product once word gets around. I mean one of the images is a black panther obscuring a vibrant red dress - that's about as explicit a claim as you can make without actually putting it in words.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday August 16 2020, @03:05PM (1 child)
LCDs and polarization filters are good and twisting and blocking light. You can buy LCD shades for many years at immense expense and making them with pixels is no biggie. It won't get very dark, but it would kinda work. The black panther would likely look like a gray kittie but it would be recognizable as an attempt at darkness.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Sunday August 16 2020, @05:35PM
Actually the technology is quite cheap, and will get plenty dark. That's *exactly* what LCD TVs and computer screens are built from. You have a constant bright white backlight shining through colored filters, and then through an LCD sub-pixel matrix that only allows through as much light as desired for each colored subpixel. And LCD TVs can get plenty black. Not compared to OLED or CRT perhaps, but still pretty darn good.