 Everything you learn today will be irrelevant in six months. That's what one expert told me about micro LED or micro LED, the emerging display technology that's supposed to offer all of the benefits of OLED like deep blacks and practically instantaneous pixel response times without any of the drawbacks that OLEDs are notorious for like low brightness, short lifespan and of course burn-in. Micro LED is everywhere at CES 2020 both from brands you know and some you don't. But I have some questions like why are all these first displays so huge? Are they really gonna completely replace OLED? And most importantly what needs to happen before Riley can get his car drive down to Best Buy and pluck a 65 inch micro LED off the shelf? Answers to these questions and more right after this message from our sponsor Pulseway. If you enjoy getting work done while not at work then you need Pulseway, the software that lets you remotely monitor, manage and control all your IT systems from one app. Try for free and get 20% off their team's plan when you sign up at the link below. All the different micro LED screens on the show floor seem to have two things in common. They're huge and they all use a modular structure. So instead of being one big piece of glass like the TV in your living room, these LED video walls are made up of smaller screens called cabinets that are say 27 or 36 inches diagonal. These cabinets can be arranged in any funky configuration or aspect ratio that you want and they're electronically independent of one another. Meaning one part of the screen shining at full brightness for example does not make another part of the screen dimmer like it does on LCD or OLED because the cabinets aren't sharing a single input current and a rep at Samsung even told me that the cabinets are hot swappable. So if one cabinet died in the middle of you watching a movie you could theoretically pull it out, grab a new one and replace it without ever having to stop the movie. Not bad. Now technically if you wanted to increase the resolution of your LED video wall all you'd have to do is add more cabinets and potentially more of the controllers that the cabinets plug into on the back. Since any screen that's 38 40 pixels wide by 21 60 pixels tall is 4k UHD right? Well sort of but that doesn't help Riley get his 65 inch microled TV does it? For that we have to stuff more pixels into a smaller area. In other words we have to decrease pixel pitch. That's the center to center distance between neighboring pixels and it's one of the key specs of the cabinets that make up the LED walls. The prototype 75 inch 4k wall that Samsung has at their booth right now at CS2020 has a pixel pitch of 0.43 millimeters for example. However decreasing pixel pitch can actually impact black levels because the space between pixels is usually covered with a shader. Basically it's a black plastic that absorbs light. The less space between pixels the less black there is for you to look at. That's one reason why Samsung adds an optional dark coating to the cabinet surface even though it makes the display more reflective which messes with the microled's otherwise perfect viewing angles. Hey wait a second James did you just say that Samsung already made a prototype 75 inch microled? That's TV size can't they just put that all on one screen instead of a bunch of cabinets and call it the world's first microled TV? Well mister they actually could do that today. Sure it would be ridiculously expensive but these modular video walls are expensive too. The reason everyone's taking this modular approach is because it actually makes business sense to do that today because for every one rich guy's house where you can install a Samsung wall or a Sony crystal led the kind of rich guy who could afford our theoretical tv there's a hundred literally 100 business customers who want a large led video wall often costing even more money. Okay smart guy if it's really about money then what has to happen before microled TVs are cheap enough for me on my internet tech news host salary? The answer my mustache friend has to do with three manufacturing constraints wafer cost, throughput and yield. Similar to CPUs micro leds are grown on wafers each wafer is covered in dyes which represent the micro leds but take a second to appreciate how many dyes this is. A 4k tv has over 8 million pixels and each pixel is going to need at least three micro leds for RGB red blue and green. Factor in our old friend pixel pitch and you've got millions of dyes with unused space in between them taking up valuable wafer real estate to the tune of about five thousand dollars for one 55 inch screen compare that to about 400 bucks for OLED but that's not all all of those dyes have to be picked up by a stamp and then moved over to the tv substrate a process called mass transfer the stamp moves back and forth and back and forth for all the dyes in a process that currently takes hours that low level of factory throughput is just unacceptable when you're talking about a mass market product like tvs where you need to be able to make millions per year but hold on because it gets even worse once all the dyes are transferred only then can you turn the display on so to speak to see how many of them are actually working yields of 99.5% are attainable now but that's not enough because if 0.5% of 24 million dyes are broken you have to fix over 1.2 million dyes meaning a little laser has to then move over each dead led and replace it reducing throughput by a few hours more but remember when i said everything you learn today will be irrelevant in six months even while here at ces companies have announced manufacturing techniques that aim to drastically cut the cost of micro led production so who knows if we're lucky maybe even at ces 2021 when riley's mustache is just a little more silver samsung will show a prototype micro led tv of that precious man's dreams sleep well little prince oh wait a second my thing is going off yes this is the voice of linus and also the face of linus what's up guys pulseway is the real-time remote monitoring and management software that you need in your life from just one app okay technically there's apps for both android and ios so it's not just one app there's more than one app but it doesn't matter the point is from your app you can scan install and update all your systems on the go by sending commands it's compatible with mac windows and of course linux and you can even deploy custom scripts so that your it tasks happen auto magically so what are you waiting for try pulseway for free and get 20 off their team's plan for your business at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys like the video get subscribed be sure to check out our merch store lttstore.com where you can get the underwear that i assure you definitely wear