X (formerly Twitter) has seen huge changes since Elon Musk acquired it. Two CEOs were changed, and the company changed the whole ‘Verified’ system and turned it into a revenue stream through paid subscriptions. Now, the company is getting close to launching its video streaming app for smart TVs.
A few months ago, X revealed that the company is working on a video streaming app for smart TVs, including Samsung’s. The social media giant has now revealed the design of the app. It largely looks like the YouTube app, with tabs on the left side of the screen and horizontal rows of videos on the rest of the screen. The top row shows trending videos followed by the row of ‘For You’ videos. There is a search bar on the top.
X CEO revealed the company will bring real-time, engaging content to smart TVs with its upcoming app. She claimed the app will offer a high-quality, immersive entertainment experience on larger screens. The company is still building the app, but you can watch a sneak peek of the design in the video below. Since Samsung is the world’s biggest TV brand, the X TV app will be available for Tizen OS as well.
The app will display AI-powered topics and organize videos according to those topics. Thanks to a seamless experience, users can start watching videos on their phones and continue watching them on TV. There will also be a casting option for smartphones and tablets. The app will also have enhanced video search.
Microsoft is going full speed ahead with its upcoming Windows 11 update 24H2, also known as Hudson Valley. It’s bringing more artificial intelligence (AI) features to the operating system, including AI Explorer, and as such Microsoft will be adding a feature that can tell users whether their PC will support it. Or you can look that information up for yourself.
Update 24H2, most likely launching in September or October 2024, will not only require PopCnt but a mandatory SSE4.2 requirement added to the undelaying code. This update will feature some truly great AI tools and enhancements to many Windows apps and programs like Windows Copilot and Cocreator AI-powered assistants for apps like Notepad and Paint.
Of course, the biggest feature is the aforementioned AI Explorer, which will make records of a user’s previous actions and transform them into ‘searchable moments,’ thereby allowing users to search as well as retract them.
Over on X, Albacore found out (and Neowin reported on) that “a cautionary message will be displayed on such systems not meeting the requirements.” It’s a handy system for those who aren’t sure whether their PCs can handle these new AI features. However, instead of waiting until the update drops later in 2024 users can check if their PCs are AI-enabled right now.
Looking at bits present in insider build 26200, AI Explorer indeed checks these requirements and if they aren’t met, a warning will be present in its overlays. You can however skip the check altogether by disabling ID 48486440. This only disables AIX making the check, not the API https://t.co/XmnjzCZqEwApril 22, 2024
Is your PC AI-enabled? Check now
Dell published a support page that instructs users how to accomplish this themselves. A key aspect here is your computer needs to have a built-in neural processing unit (NPU); that’s a specialized processor designed for handling AI-based tasks, doing so more efficiently and using less power in the process that a CPU.
Dedicated NPUs are often found in PCs featuring Intel‘s 14th-Gen processors, AMD‘s Ryzen 7000 and 8000 series, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 or Snapdragon X Elite and newer.
You can see the steps for checking for NPUs in general, as well as how to check for the required drivers for Intel and AMD processors. As for Qualcomm processors, all AI hardware drivers are pre-installed and are updated via Windows Update.
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On 9 April, the European Court of Human Rights delivered a groundbreaking ruling: states are obliged to protect their citizens from the threats and harms of climate change. And in that regard, judges said, Switzerland’s climate action has been inadequate (see go.nature.com/4azjhvd).
This marks the first time that an international human-rights court has linked protection of human rights with duties to mitigate global warming, clarifying once and for all that climate law and policy do not operate in a human-rights vacuum. The ruling is bound to alter the course of climate protection around the world.
How science bolstered a key European climate-change case
As a lawyer who helped to collate scientific and legal evidence to advise the court, I consider this judgment crucial in putting climate law and policy on a human-rights track. It sets a precedent for the 46 member states of the Council of Europe and will act as a benchmark for climate-change litigation worldwide. The ruling makes judicial history, in terms of the legal remedies and the judges’ reasoning.
Here’s what the ruling contains, why it must be seen as a success, and what nations must do to comply.
At its heart is Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR): the right to private and family life. Unlike most laws, human rights are formulated to be open-ended so authorities can secure the protection of these rights in the face of new threats. Climate change is such a threat — and one that, unlike conventional environmental hazards, “should carry considerable weight in the weighing-up of any competing considerations”, according to the judges.
The court held that countries need to “adopt, and to effectively apply in practice, regulations and measures capable of mitigating the existing and potentially irreversible future effects of climate change”. It differentiated between climate ambition — the level of protection from adverse effects of climate change to which people are entitled — and the means of providing protection. Ambition can be reviewed by the court; the choice of means, less so.
Without prescribing specific years or percentage reductions, the ruling set out how a nation can show it is compliant. It must set out a timetable and targets for achieving carbon neutrality, and pathways and interim targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Measures must be implemented in a timely, appropriate and consistent manner. Governments must also provide evidence that they have complied with targets, and update targets regularly.
Do climate lawsuits lead to action? Researchers assess their impact
Two more requirements follow from Article 8 of the ECHR. States must provide information about climate regulations and measures (or their absence) to the public. And they must take citizens’ views into account in decisions.
Switzerland has not met these requirements, the judges found by 16 votes to one. Its regulatory framework is not sufficient to provide and apply “effective protection of individuals within its jurisdiction from the adverse effects of climate change on their life and health”.
What must Switzerland do now? Both the executive and the legislature must act, from the Federal Council to parliaments and governments at the federal, cantonal and municipal levels. They must set a greenhouse-gas budget and emissions pathways with timetables that are scientifically sound, legally binding and capable of bringing about the necessary reductions. Authorities must become more responsive to the needs of people most affected by climate change and find ways of acting on their views.
Reactions to the ruling are not promising. Several Swiss newspapers, politicians and commentators have claimed that ‘foreign’ judges are ‘making domestic climate policy’, calling it ‘dangerous’, and warning of a ‘demise of democracy’. This is disconcerting for several reasons.
Fifty years ago, Switzerland voluntarily committed itself to the ECHR, and abiding by the rule of law is an essential part of being a democratic state. As the court emphasized, “democracy cannot be reduced to the will of the majority of the electorate and elected representatives, in disregard of the requirements of the rule of law. The remit of domestic courts and the Court is therefore complementary to those democratic processes”. Swiss domestic courts had a chance to adjudicate on the matter, but failed. The Swiss government also knew that it was doing too little, having for decades avoided introducing meaningful emissions reductions for fear of holding back the economy.
Switzerland should welcome the judgement as a nudge to overcome inertia, just as the Netherlands and Germany have done over similar rulings by their domestic courts. Thanks to the KlimaSeniorinnen, policymakers now know what level of protection they must guarantee, and they have access to cutting-edge studies on emissions budgets.
Countries are legally bound to protect their citizens from climate change. Until they do so, those who suffer the most will have to insist on their basic rights being respected.
A TikTok ban in the United States is closer than it’s ever been, with the US House of Representatives voting through the relevant legislation on Saturday – meaning it could become law in just a few days.
As reported by Android Authority and others, the short-form video and social media app needs to cut ties with Chinese owner ByteDance within the next six months (with a possible three-month extension) if it’s to continue operating in the US.
If you’re just catching up, the United States government is concerned about ByteDance’s links to the authorities in China – in terms of both the data that can be collected on users through TikTok, and the sort of content that can be pushed in front of eyeballs.
Technically, it’s TikTok’s China links that raised national security concerns, not the app itself – so a ban would be something of a last resort if TikTok can’t be put in the hands of another company. The app won’t suddenly disappear next week, but the new law is designed to force a sale.
‘Trampling free speech’
We’ve been here before – the possibility of a TikTok ban has been swirling since 2020 and the Trump presidency. However, it’s now closer than ever: all that remains is Senate approval and a Biden signature, both of which are expected to be formalities.
For its part, TikTok says a ban would “trample the free speech” of the 170 million users the app has in the US. A spokesperson pointed out that the app and its creators contribute some $24 billion (£19.4 billion / AU$37.4 billion) to the United States economy.
ByteDance also refutes the claims that it has to do what the Chinese government tells it. It’s been working to store more of its data on US servers, and 60% of the company is currently owned by global investors.
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It’s another reminder of the algorithms that now dominate our digital lives – and how those algorithms are controlled, both in their own countries and internationally, has governments more worried than ever. For more details on what might happen next, read our full TikTok ban explainer.
Today’s Wordle is the most difficult we’ve had so far in 2024, but that doesn’t come close to describing how tough it is. ‘Wordle 1,037 X’ is trending high on Twitter, which is always a sign of a hard puzzle, and some 13% of players have failed it so far.
Solving it in six guesses or fewer and preserving your Wordle streak will be a challenge, that’s for sure. But there are ways to play it to avoid heartache (or the Wordle equivalent; this is only a game, after all). These strategies might be too late to help you now, but they could save you next time a game like this crops up. And it will.
To explain what they are, I’ll need to include SPOILERS FOR TODAY’S WORDLE, GAME #1,037, ON SUNDAY, 21 APRIL 2024. So please don’t read on if you haven’t already completed it. Just bear in mind that you might want some hints for Wordle today before doing so.
How hard?
OK, so let’s talk about today’s Wordle word and exactly how hard it was.
The answer to game #1,037, assuming you’ve played by now **FINAL SPOILER ALERT**, is JOLLY – and it really is causing a lot of problems.
The way I assess the difficulty of each Wordle is to consult WordleBot, the New York Times’ AI-powered helper tool. Each day, WordleBot analyzes the games of everyone who plays and reports an average score for it. And today, it says people are solving it in an average of 5.4 guesses. That’s based on a random sample of 1,778,346 Wordlers who have so far played it – so it’s a pretty sizeable survey.
I’ve recorded the WordleBot average scores every day since the tool launched in April 2022, meaning I now have a list of 749 games ranked by difficulty. By that measure, JOLLY is the hardest Wordle so far in 2024, comfortably beating the previous holder of that title, PIPER, which was a 5.2 game in February.
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But that only tells half of the tale, because JOLLY is in fact the toughest Wordle since June 2023, and is actually the equal fourth worst ever. Only PARER (average score 6.3), MUMMY (5.8) and JAZZY (5.5) have been harder, while FOYER, RIPER and JOKER all had the same 5.4 average.
Unsurprisingly, many players are struggling. Some 233,791 Wordlers have failed to solve it as of the time of writing, which is 13% of the total. That’s a super-high failure rate.
Turn to Twitter and you can see the reaction, with scores of players posting their games and bemoaning their luck:
A quick glance is enough to see one of the main causes of this glut of failures – namely the too-many-answers problem. But it’s far from the only one.
Too many answers
(Image credit: New York Times)
Lots of the hardest Wordles ever share a common theme, namely too-many-answers. In other words, the solution is one that could have been another word if you just changed one (or sometimes two) letters.
There are several of these traps, for instance -IGHT, -OUND and -ATCH. The first of those has nine possible solutions: WIGHT, EIGHT, RIGHT, TIGHT, LIGHT, FIGHT, SIGHT, MIGHT and NIGHT. The second has eight – WOUND, ROUND, POUND, HOUND, FOUND, SOUND, MOUND and BOUND – while the third has seven (WATCH, PATCH, LATCH, HATCH, MATCH, BATCH and CATCH).
The -OLLY trap, meanwhile, is on a par with -ATCH, because it has seven definite answers: LOLLY, JOLLY, HOLLY, GOLLY, FOLLY, MOLLY and DOLLY. It’s up there with the worst possible formats.
These kind of games are a nightmare if you play on hard mode, where you can easily get stuck with four green letters and be forced to randomly guess letters in the search of the right one. So my first tip is simply not to play on hard mode! Or, if you do, you need to bear in mind that this kind of thing might happen, and guard against it from the very start,
Worse still here, the eventual answer was JOLLY, which begins with the least common letter in the game. This is something I prove in my analysis of every Wordle answer; J only appears in 27 of Wordle’s 2,309 original solutions, and it’s therefore not a letter most people use very often.
Add to that the fact that JOLLY also includes a repeated letter – which itself is a less common occurrence than getting five individual letters – and you have a game that’s set up to make life difficult for you.
How to play one of these games and win
The key to beating a game like JOLLY – unless you play on hard mode – is to narrow down your options as early as possible.
What this means is not chasing a high score, because that way lies disaster. Let’s say you established this was an -OLLY word as early as the third guess, which isn’t unreasonable depending on what your start word was. In that scenario, it can be tempting to guess common words such as FOLLY, say, or HOLLY, in the search of that average-beating 4/6 score.
DO NO DO THIS.
Instead, the second you realize that there are more answers left than guesses, the only way to consistently beat Wordle is to find a narrowing-down word that eliminates as many options as possible. In my example above, it was MIGHT – because that ruled out MOLLY, GOLLY and HOLLY in a single guess, leaving me with only JOLLY left to play next time.
This goes against many people’s instincts, because it involves leaving out green letters, which just feels wrong. But it’s what WordleBot does, and the ‘bot is far smarter than you or I.
In some cases, you might even need to play two such words, and in fact I kind of did that; LOWLY, which I played the guess before MIGHT, was chosen partly to rule out LOLLY as an option. The important thing is to establish what all of the options are, draw up a list of all those possible letters (in this case F, H, G, L, M, D and J), then think of words that contain as many of them as possible.
You could consider this an overly cautious and maybe cowardly way to play Wordle, but if you value your streak then it’s the only approach that makes sense.
Sony revealed its 2024 TV lineup earlier this week and the announcements included four new models. The Sony Bravia 9 is the flagship TV for 2024, but, in a reversal of course for the company’s flagship models, it will use mini-LED technology, not OLED.
Sony’s mid-range OLED, the Sony A80L, was one of the best TVs released last year. Its flagship QD-OLED, the Sony A95L, was also extremely popular, and when we saw it, we were blown away. The best OLED TVs provide near-perfect black levels and contrast and Sony has been a consistent user of the display tech since its early days.
So, why has Sony opted for mini-LED for its 2024 flagship model? It’s by no means the first time the company has sold mini-LED TVs – last year’s Sony X95L was a fantastic set that we rated five stars – but the tech has never been used for Sony’s flagship TV before. Why the change?
It’s worth noting that the Sony A95L was released outside Sony’s usual summer window last year, finally shipping in October and September in the US and UK. As such, it carries over as Sony’s top OLED model for 2024. But with the Bravia 9 mini-LED model, and the simultaneous introduction of the Bravia 7, another, more entry-level, mini-LED, Sony seems to be doubling down on the technology – here’s why.
The movie industry
The Great Gatsby (pictured) is one movie already mastered at 4,000 nits. (Image credit: Warner Bros UK)
At the end of 2023, Sony released its latest professional mastering monitor, the BVM-HX3110, which is seeing increased usage within the movie industry. It served as a follow-up to Sony’s HX310 monitor, which peaked at 1,000 nits brightness, a level most movies are mastered at.
The HX3110, in contrast, has a peak brightness of 4,000 nits. Sony is starting to master more movies at this higher brightness level and believes the industry will follow. For context, it points to movies such as The Great Gatsby, In the Heart of the Sea and Angry Birds, all of which had been mastered at 4,000 nits before the introduction of the HX3110. A Sony demo at CES 2018 also showed Gran Turismo 7, mastered at 10,000 nits, on its prototype 8K TV with a peak brightness of 4,000 nits.
With movies now being mastered at a higher brightness level, Sony believes you’ll need a brighter screen at home to handle it. New OLED TVs are brighter than ever, with models such as the LG G3 hitting a peak brightness of nearly 1,500 nits, and although we expect new OLED models to get even brighter, they don’t quite hit the same level as mini-LED.
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The Bravia 9 (pictured) utilizes Sony’s new mini-LED tech. (Image credit: Future)
Sony’s flagship TV for 2024, the Bravia 9, features a new type of mini-LED backlight design with much smaller LED drivers than had been used before. According to Sony, these new 22-bit drivers enable higher brightness, bolder colors, and ‘OLED-level’ blacks. Since each driver is smaller than a grain of rice, a higher number can be arrayed in the backlight, allowing for more dimming zones and greater lighting control.
The Bravia 9 is said to be 50% brighter and has three times the dimming zones of the Sony X95L, its flagship mini-LED TV from 2023, while using 20% less energy Sony also says the backlight technology used in the Bravia 9 is similar to the one in the HX3110 mastering monitor, and that makes the Bravia 9 the best companion to show any movies mastered on the HX3110.
Interestingly, Sony hasn’t released any brightness specifications for the Bravia 9. If this is the ideal set to show movies mastered on the HX3110, you would naturally assume it will hit 4,000 nits but when TechRadar asked Sony about that at CES 2024, a company rep said it was unlikely. We’ll have to wait until we can test the Bravia 9 to determine its actual peak brightness.
XR Backlight Master Drive
Sony’s new backlight tech (pictured right) shows greater detail than standard mini-LED tech (pictured left). (Image credit: Future)
It’s not just new LED drivers that Sony has implemented in its mini-LED TV backlight, but also its XR processor. Sony has called the feature XR Backlight Master Drive, and the XR processor manages backlight dimming differently.
Once the TV has received an input signal, the XR Processor begins its work by separating the TV’s LCD panel and backlight data. After this, the LED drivers tell the mini-LEDs what to do. There is greater control over the lighting here than with a standard LED backlight (and even with current mini-LED tech) and it results in a picture with greater contrast and more powerful brightness with less backlight blooming.
Final thoughts
We’ve already seen Sony’s latest mini-LED tech in the Bravia 9 in action, and we think OLED TVs should be worried. Thanks to the combination of the XR processor and new LED drivers, the Bravia 9 could be a real winner, and, as Sony says, ideal for displaying movies mastered with the HX3110 monitor.
By carrying over the Sony A95L from last year, Sony has made it clear it’s not abandoning OLED, although mini-LED tech certainly seems to be the company’s priority for the future. Whether its new tech will beat OLED and QD-OLED remains to be seen, but 2024 is going to be an interesting year for TVs.
In Georgia’s 2020 gubernatorial election, some voters in Atlanta waited over 10 hours to cast a ballot. One reason for the long lines was that almost 10 percent of Georgia’s polling sites had closed over the preceding seven years, despite an influx of about 2 million voters. These closures were disproportionately concentrated in predominantly Black areas that tended to vote Democratic.
But pinpointing the locations of “voting deserts” isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. Sometimes a lack of capacity is reflected in long waits at the polls, but other times the problem is the distance to the nearest polling place. Combining these factors in a systematic way is tricky.
In a paper due to be published this summer in the journal SIAM Review, Mason Porter, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his students used tools from topology to do just that. Abigail Hickok, one of the paper’s coauthors, conceived the idea after seeing images of long lines in Atlanta. “Voting was on my mind a lot, partly because it was an especially anxiety-inducing election,” she said.
Topologists study the underlying properties and spatial relations of geometric shapes under transformation. Two shapes are considered topologically equivalent if one can deform into the other via continuous movements without tearing, gluing, or introducing new holes.
At first glance, topology would seem to be a poor fit for the problem of polling site placement. Topology concerns itself with continuous shapes, and polling sites are at discrete locations. But in recent years, topologists have adapted their tools to work on discrete data by creating graphs of points connected by lines and then analyzing the properties of those graphs. Hickok said these techniques are useful not only for understanding the distribution of polling places but also for studying who has better access to hospitals, grocery stores, and parks.
That’s where the topology begins.
Imagine creating tiny circles around each point on the graph. The circles start with a radius of zero, but they grow with time. Specifically, when the time exceeds the wait time at a given polling place, the circle will begin to expand. As a consequence, locations with shorter wait times will have bigger circles—they start growing first—and locations with longer wait times will have smaller ones.
Some circles will eventually touch each other. When this happens, draw a line between the points at their centers. If multiple circles overlap, connect all those points into “simplices,” which is just a general term meaning shapes such as triangles (a 2-simplex) and tetrahedrons (3-simplex).
Smartphones have replaced a truly astounding number of things in everyday life, from cameras to calculators, and alarm clocks to wallets; and, based on the current state of foldables, ereaders – such as Amazon‘s ever-popular Kindle line – could be next.
The ereader is a great product in its own right, able to store an entire library’s worth of literature. What’s more, advancements in the category have lead to higher-resolution displays, tonal backlights for easier-on-the-eye late-night reading, longer battery life, faster charging, and even water resistance – ensuring that your poolside progress through that steamy new romance novel remains unimpeded when the noisy kids two sun-loungers down try to outdo one another in a game of ‘cannonball’.
But as innovative as such ereader advancements might seem in a vacuum, smartphones – even though they lack the same specializations – are otherwise already several steps ahead on a technical level, and closing the gap on the traits that define Kindles and the like as the superior reading gadgets.
When it comes to legibility in bright conditions, smartphone screen tech is catching up with ereaders (Image credit: Future | Alex Walker-Todd)
I first came to this realization when the original iPad launched. Being able to see comics in full color on a large-but-portable high-fidelity backlit LCD was a truly revelatory experience at the time, and one that made me question my Kindle loyalty, even then. More recently, however, it’s the OnePlus Open which has been the device to show me a viable ereading future beyond my trusty Kindle Oasis.
For one, even Amazon’s best Kindles haven’t yet ventured into color visuals and, personally, being able to enjoy full-fidelity cover art makes a real difference to the excitement of starting a new book. Sure, the newly-launched Kobo Libra Color and Kobo Clara Color‘s Kaleido 3 E Ink displays are impressive in their ability to display 4,096 hues, but compared to the Open’s one billion color-capable AMOLED, there’s no contest.
Of course, color visuals alone do not a superior viewing experience make, but the OnePlus Open doesn’t stop there, screen-wise. It’s also impressively bright, offering one of the brightest foldable displays currently on the market, which means it’s one of the best screens for reading in bright conditions, in spite of the display technology at play. And while the Open may not have the perfect riposte to an E Ink display, other phone makers are now pushing technologies that could soon see smartphone outdoor legibility right up there with your Kindle’s.
Image 1 of 6
(Image credit: Future | Alex Walker-Todd)
TCL 50 XL NxtPaper in Ink Paper mode
(Image credit: Future | Alex Walker-Todd)
(Image credit: Future | Alex Walker-Todd)
TCL 50 XL NxtPaper in True Tone mode
(Image credit: Future | Alex Walker-Todd)
(Image credit: Future | Alex Walker-Todd)
(Image credit: Future | Alex Walker-Todd)
TCL 50 XL NxtPaper in Color Paper mode
Along with the obvious suite of spec bumps the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra has received, one of the less appreciated upgrades is the reduced reflectivity of its display, which the company has managed to cut by a impressive 75%. Then there’s TCL‘s NxtPaper technology, which having seen first-hand on the TCL 50 XL NxtPaper, I think could be the answer to the prayers of those who want a device that has E Ink-like legibility and low reflectivity, while also offering the traditional benefits of a full-color backlit smartphone screen.
While the Open has an Eye Comfort mode that allows for warmer color temperatures and monochromatic viewing, Xiaomi takes the experience on its phones one step further by including a texture slider in its Paper reading mode that simulates a more paper-like grain on-screen. While I haven’t verified the science, personal opinion and anecdotal evidence from other users online suggests that it ups the ease of reading even further.
Then there’s the form factor to consider – a foldable may be thicker than a Kindle, but it offers a similarly sized display while being able to collapse down into a far more compact (and more pocketable) footprint. And although battery life is still measured in days, rather than weeks – because of those countless other things smartphones are equipped to do – 67W fast charging is on-hand to refill the Open in around 30 minutes, while Kindles take an hour or more to charge.
So, while there’s still work to do in the quest to make the foldable smartphone the one device to rule them all, the chapter in which you pack your phone and your Kindle before your next long-haul flight or weekend away may be coming to an end.
We might only be a couple of weeks in to the 2024 TV hardware season, but it’s already looking set to be a transformative year for the once humble gogglebox. One where we could see the long-established best TV landscape transformed so much by a battle over brightness that a once-key premium TV technology may find itself fighting for survival.
This sounds like pretty apocalyptic talk, I realise, at a time when most AV fans (apart from a few middle aged CRT fans, maybe) would likely say that when it comes to TV technology, we’ve never had it so good. Intense rivalries between the world’s biggest manufacturers and, increasingly, competing technologies have propelled the TV world forward over the past 10 years at an unprecedented rate, leaving us spoilt for choice like never before.
This cheerful place of TV excellence we’ve arrived at, though, has been built around key principles that have remained more or less steady (there are always exceptions, of course) throughout this accelerated period of TV evolution. Namely that OLED TVs tend to be thought of as the premium option for serious movie fans who like to watch their TV in dark rooms, while LCD TVs appeal for their cheapness at the lower end of the market, and their much higher, living room friendly brightness at the premium end of the market. It’s this premium LCD market, though, that’s suddenly starting to feel squeezed.
QD-OLED: A big brightness boost
(Image credit: Future)
Exhibit A in this redrawn battle for TV supremacy comes, ironically, in the shape of the Samsung S95D OLED TVs. I’ve been lucky enough to spend a few days in the company of these flagship models from Samsung’s 2024 Quantum Dot OLED TV range, and I’m still reeling from what I witnessed. In particular, easily the most brightness I’ve ever seen from an OLED screen.
My own measurements recorded a light output over a small 2% white test area on the S95D of more than 2,100 nits, and nearly 1800 nits on a 10% test window. This latter measurement was up nearly 400 nits on Samsung’s previous flagship QD OLED TV, which itself tied for the brightest OLED TV ever with LG’s G3 series (a series which introduced new micro lens array technology to better focus the light output emerging from their WRGB OLED panels).
We don’t have exact figures yet on how the new LG G4 Micro Lens Array OLEDs might be shaping up, but we’ve seen enough of it to know that it is going to be brighter than the G3 was. As, almost certainly, will be other OLED TVs from other brands that use either Quantum Dot or micro lens array OLED technologies. Long gone are the days when it was exciting if an OLED TV hit 600 nits.
What all this means is that there’s suddenly an army of OLED TVs starting to push well and truly into brightness territory that was once exclusively the domain of light living room-friendly premium LCD TVs. I’ve watched the Samsung S95D in a bright day lit room, and believe me: It remains very watchable indeed. Especially as this series also happens to feature a remarkably effective reflection-rejecting filter on the front of its screen.
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OLED closes the gap with LCD
(Image credit: Future)
The new-found brightness of OLED TVs joins their legendary contrast-enhancing self-emissive design, where every pixel in their screens produce its own light, rather than external backlighting having to be shared across many thousands of pixels as happens with all LCD TVs.
OLED TVs also more readily deliver realistic wide viewing angles than LCD TVs can. And while LCD TVs used to command an (on paper, at least) a brightness-based colour volume advantage, the pure RGB approach of Samsung’s Quantum Dot OLED approach and first impressions of a startling processing inspired colour saturation boost to LG’s new G4 OLED series suggest that this LCD colour volume advantage is also sliding away.
While the new OLED generation undermines premium LCD TVs’ traditional appeal, though, it’s not game over just yet. For instance, they still boast immunity to screen burn – an issue where prolonged exposure to static image elements can cause areas of the organic elements in OLED screens to fade faster than their neighbours, causing onscreen logos and the like to gradually leave a permanent image of themselves on the screen.
Here again, though, recent OLED panels seem to have seriously started to tackle their old burn-in nemesis, with reports of it occurring on relatively recent OLED TVs dwindling to almost nothing – despite the OLED panels also getting significantly brighter.
Premium LCD’s consistency issues
(Image credit: Future)
Another case in favour of premium LCD TVs is their potential brightness consistency. While OLED TVs can now get dramatically bright over a certain amount of their screen area, they still come up significantly short of premium LCDs with images that fill the whole screen with brightness.
Even the ‘light cannon’ Samsung S95D QD OLEDs can only hit around 330 nits of brightness with a full-screen white HDR test screen, while Samsung’s latest flagship LCD TV, the QE75QN900D, can muster almost twice as much luminance(639 nits) in the same conditions. So in theory, at least, premium LCD TVs have a better chance of delivering a more consistent bright HDR experience.
There’s a problem here too, though. Premium LCD TVs (which inevitably use local dimming systems these days) have consistency issues of their own. This can appear as blooming, where extraneous light spills out around bright objects when they appear against a dark backdrop, or it can appear in dimming down of small stand-out bright objects as the TV tries to avoid backlight blooming.
All the main LCD brands are consistently working to resolve these issues, including, especially, Sony, with new LCD backlight technology it showed off at this year’s CES. But no consumer TV yet has fully nailed it yet.
Keeping LCD relevant
(Image credit: Future)
This leaves trying to keep ahead of OLED with their brightness as perhaps the best or, at least, most obvious hope for premium LCD TVs to keep themselves relevant. Samsung seems to have grasped this, as you might have expected with a brand that ranges similarly priced premium LCD and OLED TVs in its range.
As we discovered in a recent hands on, Samsung’s QN90D is hitting 2000 nits on a 10% HDR window, while Samsung’s QN900D8K models are getting right up to more than 2400 nits (a big improvement on their predecessors, which got caught in the 2023 drama surrounding the introduction of unexpectedly harsh EU TV power consumption rules).
TCL has launched an LCD TV with 5000 nits of brightness to go with 5000 local dimming zones, while Hisense let the nits rip at the 2024 CES with a 110-inch screen capable of delivering a claimed 10,000 nits.
Sony, too, seems to understand the need for brightness speed with its LCD TVs – not just because that’s where the difference with OLED lies, either, but also based on a long-running philosophical belief that brightness is fundamentally important to delivering high dynamic range video convincingly. Sony’s debut 8K TVs remarkably punched up to 4000 nits way back in 2019, and nobody who saw it will quickly forget the 10,000-nit render of Gran Turismo playing on a prototype 8K LCD display on Sony’s 2018 CES stand.
Plus, as mentioned earlier, Sony also showed off a new ultra bright LCD backlight design with much more light control and power efficiency at 2024’s CES, which appears to be a potential consumer response to the new 4000-nit capable BVM-HX3110 mastering monitor Sony’s professional division rolled out at the end of 2023.
Can LCD deliver a brigher future?
(Image credit: TCL)
All these big numbers sounds pretty promising for premium LCD, to be fair. I personally love lots of brightness myself for HDR viewing too, for whatever that’s worth. But just as that mention of Sony’s new high-brightness mastering monitor maybe points to a bright, shining, OLED-duffing future, it also brings us to one final big problem: Creatives currently don’t seem to be embracing the sort of brightness premium LCD supporters are going to need to chase to retain an OLED ‘gap’.
I’ve met a few professional colourists in recent times who all seem more than content to work within 1000-nit limits (apart from maybe a brief sunlight bloom here or spotlight there). In which case, all those extra nits of brightness premium LCD TVs are chasing might not end up having much real-world value.
Obviously Sony hopes its new mastering monitor might start to shift the dial on filmmaker’s relationship with brightness. Especially when there are premium LCD TVs out there in the consumer world capable of handling all those nits. I hope that happens too, actually.
But until or unless that happens – and at best I predict it will be a pretty long process – premium LCD TVs look like they’re going to have to work harder than they ever have before to hold off the challenge of the OLEDs now starting to aggressively park their tanks on premium LCD’s brightness-based lawn.
It’s called Circle to Search, which can be used to do Google searches on anything that is on your phone or tablet screen. As Google puts it, “Circle to Search can help you quickly identify items in a photo or video.”
Circle to Search is accessed by long-pressing the home button, and you draw a circle around the item, object, or text of interest so Google can look it up on the internet. Think of it as an advanced version of Google Images, the search engine that lets you find images on the World Wide Web.
However, to some, Circle to Search may feel unnecessary or overrated. While Circle to Search works great, not everyone is looking for something so advanced, and they are perfectly fine sticking to the old Google Assistant to search for things by typing or voicing their query.
Unfortunately, Samsung decided that the home button gesture to bring up Google Assistant is better suited to firing up Circle to Search. On devices that support Galaxy AI features on One UI 6.1, Google Assistant has to be accessed by swiping in from the bottom right or bottom left corner of the display.
How to disable Circle to Search on One UI 6.1
If you have been a long-time Google Assistant user, long-pressing the home button will likely be second nature to you, but doing so on One UI 6.1 will bring up Circle to Search, which you may find frustrating.
Well, while you can’t reassign the home button to Google Assistant, you can do the next best thing and save yourself from the frustration: disable the home button gesture/shortcut for Circle to Search.
Yes, Circle to Search can be disabled, and it takes just a couple of seconds. Follow the steps below to turn it off.
Open the Settings app on your phone or tablet.
Scroll down and tap Display.
Scroll down in the display menu and select Navigation bar.
Use the toggle to turn off Circle to Search.
Long-pressing the home button will no longer bring up Circle to Search. But remember: you still have to swipe in from the bottom right or bottom left corner of the display to access Google Assistant, as Google Assistant cannot be assigned to the home button anymore.
