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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

A marginal improvement in image quality isn't necessarily enough to offset a much higher panel price, in a way that creates a market for these panels.

Compare, for example, Intel's "Optane" phase change memory. It was qualitatively superior to NAND flash, but also significantly more expensive, which kept interest low and ultimately led to phase change memory being abandoned.

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MicroLED isn't theoretically more expensive - in fact, the extended lifespan, more brightness, and lower energy consumption would all be selling points which, for various customers, would lead to being willing to pay more for a product which costs the same or less to make.

No, it is actually more expensive to make, as the article states. TVs are currently sold for more than 100.000 USD:

https://www.engadget.com/a-110000-microled-tv-in-this-econom...

And the technology isn't particularly new either, which means the high cost is not a minor technical problem.

Exactly.

Blacks of OLED, brightness of LED, no burn in, no degradation over time… it would be fantastic. It’s what’s being used in some insane (~140”) TVs but at a reasonable size.

Yeah it won’t compete with LCDs on price for a while, maybe ever. But the high end of the market would love it.

>no burn in, no degradation over time

How? Don't Micro-LED displays have individual backlights for each pixel?

Micro-LED displays don't have "backlights" like regular LCD displays. They're just arrays of LEDs. Each pixel element is made up of LEDs. Like OLEDs or Plasma displays, the dots themselves are the light source instead of a film trying to filter a backlight.

Inorganic leds that are not pushed too far outside their comfort zone do not meaningfully degrade over time. The problem with them is that you cannot make the three different colors needed in a single material, so unlike oled you need to physically produce three separate kinds of components, and then transfer 25 million individual components onto a substrate to manufacture a 4k display.

This will never be cheap.

> The problem with them is that you cannot make the three different colors needed in a single material,

If that's the problem, why not just make 3x white leds per pixel and have a layer of color filters, like LCDs have.

Or at least make the leds in vertical stripes, so you're not assembling 25 million components onto a substrate, but instead 4k*3 components (each assembled from 2k components, I suppose).

I think I might’ve heard of someone trying to do that, where all the LEDs are the same and they use quantum dots on top two emit the color that they want.

Maybe that’s how it’ll work. Honestly an LCD with one LED backlight per pixel would still be really nice.

Every time you print a document on a laser printer, >25 million particles of coloured plastic are arranged to within ~10um of where you want them to be on a sheet of paper, all for a total cost of a cent or two.

Moving millions of items to precise locations isn't expensive, as long as you do it the right way...

If you solve precise vapor deposition at a scale like your printer does with toner, you'll become very rich.

Those 25 million separate devices are electronic components with terminals that need to align with solder balls, and they need to stay in place until the entire assembly goes into the reflow oven.

We are not exactly talking about plastic particles here.

> Yeah it won’t compete with LCDs on price for a while, maybe ever. But the high end of the market would love it.

The problem is that it is hard for them to compete with OLED, not LCD, because the price difference is much higher than the difference in quality.

Once I saw the Fully transparent MicroLED on Display in this year's CES , it is only a matter of time before it comes to market. I can immediately see luxury Retail shop paying the premium to get it.

MicroLED is also getting cheaper. Compared to 2-3 years ago Samsung's The Wall offers 140 to 200+ inch Display that is not possible with OLED or LCD.

From a Smartphone, Tablet and Laptop prospective. OLED will be the tech going forward at least until 2030.

Before Apple cancelled it, their plan was to introduce MicroLED to their premium smartwatches and then to their premium phones. It's in the article. Meanwhile, TVs with MicroLED are extremely expensive. They can't currently be made on one substrate, or even multiple per substrate, so they instead stick multiple smaller tiles together.

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