Samsung invited us down the street to a private room in the Las Vegas Country Club to get a glimpse of some of their products in-development. As we reported at the Samsung press conference, one of the company’s major differentiators this year is their proprietary backlight LCD panels. They have a special “future” version of the panel running, showing the deepest blacks we’ve ever seen on LCD, rivaling Plasma and OLED. They estimate that contrast ratio may be 10,000,000 to 1, but there’s no way to measure that!

Well, the contrast game is on – you’ll hear more about that in upcoming posts. The mantra “plasma is the choice for quality”  may not hold anymore!

Samsung also showed us two prototype 3D displays:

• 240hz, LED backlit LCD, full 1080p 3D display. 30p + 30p in 1080. This model uses active shutter glasses, but these new glasses are smaller and lighter than the previous design – getting much closer weight-wise to polarized. The picture was bright and very compelling. No firm plans, but they would probably release it in 2010, and could see potentially selling 8M of them in their mid-range sets.
• 240hz, micropolarized display, running at 720p. Next to the backlit LCD, the polarized display was dim and softer, and the interlacing was quite apparent.

The Content Problem

Various estimates indicate there are around 1.5M 3D-ready TV’s in the market. Samsung viewed their early 3D-ready TVs as a PC gaming product, but according to Samsung, “people want movies.” And as a result, the number of displays that consumers have turned from “3D-ready” to “3D-enabled” is negligible. As an FYI, Samsung has stopped building and talking about DLP. Their 3D displays in the market today are all Plasma Display Panels.

Samsung reps tell us they are now thinking about how to potentially bring the active shutter glasses LCD model to the market, and what various bundles (glasses, movies, etc.) might be, but they want to know that there will be content (movies) to drive adoption.

Ye old chicken and egg!