Scott Wilkinson (0:00)

New Year Same extra value meals at McDonald's. So now get two snack wraps plus fries and a medium soft drink for just $8 for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery in this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I continue my coverage of CES 2026, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is. Hey there, Scott Wilkinson here, the home theater geek. In this episode, I'm going to continue covering CES 2026 without my good friend Mike Heiss. He joined me for part one, and he was going to join me for parts two and three because he actually went to the show and I didn't, but circumstances prevailed and he had to split. So I'm really sorry to to miss him on this show. I will endeavor to carry on without him. He left me a lot of great notes and some great pictures too, so we'll take a look at those. And I thank Mike for being on part one, and sorry to miss you on parts two and three, but you'll be back, no doubt about it. So this week I wanted to cover video news other than mini and micro RGB LED backlit LCD TVs, which was the subject of part one. And it was the big video story of CES 2026. So if that sounds a little confusing or you want to know more about that, go back and check out the previous episode. This time we're going to go with maybe a little more conventional video news. And I do want to apologize to Mike for one thing. I would have said this to his face had he been here, which is we were talking about a Hisense product which was actually a direct view LED set. The only one we talked about last episode in which Hisense added a yellow sub pixel and Mike made the point of, oh, well, that's been done before. Sharp did that. And I said, oh, I thought it was Phillips. And he said, well, memory fades as you get older, blah, blah blah. Turns out he was right and I was wrong. And I want to make that clear. It was the Sharp Quatron, made famous by the commercials that they did many years ago now with George Takei. Oh my. So Mike was right. He. He had remembered correctly, I had remembered incorrectly, proving that memory does in fact fade with age, but you can always recover it. Anyway, let's get to the news of CES 2026 TV news part two. I'd say the big news in that regard was the TCL X11L, which uses a advanced form of Quantum dots that they call sqd super quantum dot. It's a mini LED backlit LCD TV. It's not RGB as we talked about in the last episod. It is a more conventional, what's called quantum dot enhancement film backlight. So the backlight LEDs are blue. That blue light passes through a film impregnated with quantum dots, both red and green. The blue light stimulates the red and green quantum dots to glow. And some of the blue light passes through without hitting a quantum dot. And so you get red, green and blue added together equals white. And then that passes through the LCD layer and which has color filters, Red, green and blue color filters. And that forms the picture. They claim it has 20,000 dimming zones and a peak brightness of 10,000 nits, which is the maximum peak brightness that is defined for high dynamic range. And we've, I don't think there has been a commercial display or a consumer display, I should say that reaches that peak brightness. So that is the maximum that you can do with HDR. Now clearly the whole screen isn't going to be 10,000 nits. You'd be blinded you but but specular highlights, the tiny little reflections off of chrome in the sun and that sort of thing can now in fact reach 10,000 nits. And that is quite, quite stunning. It also implements Dolby Vision 2 Max, which I talked about in Home Theater Geeks episode 503. So if you want to learn more About Dolby Vision 2, go check out that, that episode. Okay, so what a super quantum dot, really all it means is tighter control of the size of the quantum dot. Now the size of the quantum dot determines the color or the wavelength that it emits when it's hit with blue light. And Nanosys, the company that makes the quantum dots for most TV manufacturers, was able to refine their technique to go from a plus or minus 2 nanometer peak wavelength to a plus or minus 1 nanometer peak wavelength. It actually makes a visible difference. Now the size difference between a 520 nanometer quantum dot and a 521 nanometer green quantum dot is less than 0.008 nanometer, which is less than a tenth the width of a hydrogen atom. So we're talking some serious precision here. And Nanisys was able to do what TCL asked and make these quantum dots more precise and thus have better control of the color. It also has a, a new LCD panel with wide color viewing, high static contrast up to 7,000 to 1 and a nice anti reflective screen. So With a combination of Super Quantum Dots, SQD and Ultra color filters. They refine their color filters as well and, and advanced color purity algorithm in the processing. They claim 100% of BT 2020 color gamut coverage. Now this is not true. This is marketing hype and we talked about this, Mike and I, in the last episode. So I want you to go back and check that out. Because it's physically impossible to, to actually reach full coverage of BT 2020 color without using lasers. No LCD TV can do it. It's physically impossible. Some of the manufacturers at CES were claiming more than 100% BT 2020, which is also clearly impossible even with lasers. So you take that with a, with a grain of salt and it did increase the color space that they were able to address, but it's not really 100 BT 2020. Also interesting that they're using Bang and Olufsen audio in this thing, which is a trend that I've started to see in, in higher end TVs. There. They are cooperating with high end audio makers to put their audio into the TVs. Now how good can it be with a TV that's only an eighth of an inch deep, which this one is? I mean, there's no room for sound to resonate in there. Well, what can I tell you it's coming from. It's coming in three sizes. 75 inch, 85 inch and 95 inch, 75 inches. $7,000. The 85 inch is $8,000 and the 98 is $10,000. So you know, we're talking high end here, but it should look great. I do remember Mike saying in particular that this TV looked fantastic and it was one of the only opportunities at the show to see several different technologies next to each other, which we can see in graphic 2AMike took this picture on the show floor and you can see here there's a TCL RGB mini led, which is the technology we talked about last time. In the middle is the SQD Mini led which is the one we're talking about now. And then in the right is their more conventional non super qd, but regular QD Mini LED tv. And so, you know, showgoers including Mike, were able to see the difference. And he said the SQD just looked fantastic, which I'm not surprised. One other thing that Jeff Urich, our friend from Nanisys sent me was a graphic to show the difference in spectrum. Remember we were talking about SQD having a narrower spectrum. And so here we can see RGB Mini LED in gray which is this new technology versus the QD Mini LED Spectra, I think of the sqd and as you can see, that's in white and it has higher peaks. It has a slightly lower wavelength in the red. The wavelengths in the blue and green are about the same, but it's brighter. So there is an advantage to doing it the old fashioned way, shall we say. Anyway, just thought I'd show you that. Okay, Next up is LG and they had RGB mini or micro LED backlit LCD TVs. We talked about that last episode. But they also had their OLEDs. They were all in on OLED as usual and rightly so. The big announcement I think was the W6, which is their OLED wallpaper TV. It's 9 millimeters thick, this screen, and it's wireless except for power. It uses a one sort of a wireless box where you connect your devices and sends that wirelessly to the tv. You still have to plug the TV in so when you mount it on the wall you, you know, need to put a outlet there. And it uses their new primary RGB tandem OLED structure. Their new processor, it's three, almost four times brighter than last year's W series. So that's, that's, it's going to be impressive TV, no doubt. They also introduced the C6 and G6 OLEDs which are just this, this, this year's models. The 6 indicates 2026 in case you didn't catch that. They also use this primary RGB tandem OLED structure in the G6 anyway. And the larger C6, 77 and 83 inches regular WO led the smaller sizes. The G6 claims up to 4500 nits of peak brightness in a 3% window. So OLEDs are getting brighter all the time. 4500 nits is a lot. Now one thing SAM or LG, sorry, showed at CDN and they weren't the only ones, was the concept of the art tv. Now Samsung's been doing this for years with the frame. LG got into the picture this year with the Gallery art tv, which is really art to display on your tv. And you can, you can get all sorts of art for the W6, the G6, the LX7. Their service called LG Gallery plus has 4, 500 more than 4,500 pieces of curated art content. So that was another big announcement by lg.