The future of television is transparent

One of the biggest tech shows of the year is back in session, CES. It's in Las Vegas and many of the companies making a difference in consumer technology are there to show off the latest gadgets. Tomorrow we'll tell you about the most bizarre inventions on display at CES, but today we'll dive into a trend from CES, and actually a trend in the TV space: transparent displays.

While in recent years we've mainly talked about how we want the TV to deliver a picture as black as possible when it really needs to be black. It should not “leak” that the moon looks like a sprouting onion instead of a narrow white ball on a black night. However, this is not the case with Transparent TV. It seems that everything that is black has become transparent.

Transparent TVs

The funny thing about this trend is that it doesn't really seem to fit in a lot of the regular TVs we watch: you might think you wouldn't easily see it in living rooms instead of a standard TV. It has to have a bare background to display the image well, right? You can't watch Good Times Bad Times or a movie like that, but you can put it in your home as a kind of work of art. However, that's not so bad: these TVs are more innovative than you think.

Both Samsung and LG have offered such a transparent display. It is made of small LEDs and the idea is that a tremendous amount of sharpness is achieved with many colors. In Samsung videos, for example, you see a kind of cut-out that you can simply put your hand behind and continue to see. Samsung also showed it off at CES with a football match, but this gives a slightly different effect. Just watch the video below. It gets a little more 3D, but the background showing the football match isn't very transparent.

LG Signature OLED T

LG has been working on transparent TVs for some time, and it also showed off one at CES: the Signature OLED T. The device is 77 inches and offers transparent pixels. An amazing sight, especially if you see, for example, some kind of fire that seems to stand on its own. And when we see LG, we immediately recognize Samsung. The idea is not that it is one screen. It's like double glazing. This creates a kind of augmented reality: what you see on the back screen is the “real TV” (or just a black screen), and the front screen is another layer placed on top of it. In this way, the Target can be viewed on the Samsung device. However, the backlit display can also be turned off, so you can only show a fire or an image with paint, with a transparent background.

So, yes: these transparent TVs can fit where your regular TV currently hangs. However, you have to keep in mind that it requires a little more space, especially if you want to make the effect as beautiful as possible. However, they will be expensive devices, because you have two screens (or one screen and some kind of automatic roller blind) that have to work together. However, we can already imagine how such a TV would be hung in our living room: it is a beautiful effect. BUT: It also seems a bit weak and it depends on the content how well this technology can really be used. In any case, it looks like this is coming, even though CES is often a year, maybe even several years ahead of the road.