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Home Theater Geeks 532: SID Display Week 2026
01:10:02
Annual Conclave About Cutting-Edge Display Tech
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- [00:03]
Scott Wilkinson
Where is Daredevil? A minor. Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next?
- [00:12]
Jeff Urich
I feel liberated.
- [00:14]
Scott Wilkinson
We're gonna take this city back over medicated in an all new season. Now streaming only on Disney plus. They're hunting us.
- [00:22]
Jeff Urich
It's time we started hunting them. I can work with that. This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again now streaming only Disney plus. You think a ticket for not wearing your seatbelt is the worst that could happen? A fine, an inconvenience, a little embarrassment. But then comes the crash. There are injuries, a stay in the hospital, the long road to recovery, the moment you'll miss. Suddenly a ticket doesn't seem so bad. That ticket? That was to remind you to buckle up before it's too late. Click it or ticket paid for by NHTSA
- [01:00]
Scott Wilkinson
in this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I chat with Jeff Yerik of Nanisys about his time at display week 2026. So stay tuned.
- [01:12]
TWIT Announcer
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- [02:16]
Jeff Urich
podcasts you love from people you trust.
- [02:20]
TWIT Announcer
This is Twit.
- [02:32]
Scott Wilkinson
Hey there, Scott Wilkinson here, the home theater geek in this show. We're going to talk About Display Week 2026 with Jeff Urich, who's the Vice President of Marketing at Nanosys, the supplier of quantum dots to most of the manufacturers of televisions and displays in the world. Hey Jeff, welcome back to the show.
- [02:57]
Jeff Urich
Hey Scott, good to see you. Good to be here.
- [02:58]
Scott Wilkinson
Good to see you too. Now Jeff, you're the VP of Marketing and I normally don't have marketing people on the show, but you are one of the most technically proficient people I know in this industry. So I'm really happy to have you on.
- [03:14]
Jeff Urich
Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate the special dispensation to dispensation person on here.
- [03:19]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, we are going to be talking a lot about quantum dots because that's your primary focus. It's also the primary focus of a lot of display technology that was at Display Week 2026.
- [03:32]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, definitely a ton of great quantum dot displays there and talk to you about that for sure.
- [03:37]
Scott Wilkinson
So tell us first, what is Display Week?
- [03:40]
Jeff Urich
So yeah, by the way, also just full disclosure, I'm also the marketing person for Display Week.
- [03:46]
Scott Wilkinson
So you know what it is.
- [03:49]
Jeff Urich
I know what it is. But also full disclosure about a little vested interest on that side as well.
- [03:55]
Scott Wilkinson
Okay, that's cool.
- [03:56]
Jeff Urich
So Display Week is the biggest display show in the world and it's really a special week. I think every year it's put on by the Society for Information Display, which is a great organization with members from all around the world, some of the leading experts in display technology, all the big companies you think about and display each year for a week in May or sometimes June. Next year it'll be June, everyone gets together and you get to see a ton of great demonstrations, demonstrations of new and upcoming display technologies. And there's a great technical conference associated with that. So this year I think There were over 1,000 paper submissions for everything from using AI for display manufacturing and quality control to AR VR to quantum dots to RGB mini LED, the latest OLED technologies, inkjet printing, OLED photolithography, OLED. So there's so much going on in the world of displays and this is kind of where it all happens and all comes together. So experiential. So it's just really great.
- [05:06]
Scott Wilkinson
It's really important to have to have direct eyes on experience with. With a lot of this technology. For sure. We saw a couple of pictures there. One of the. This was held at the LA Convention Center.
- [05:18]
Jeff Urich
LA Convention Center? Yep. San Jose next year.
- [05:21]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, San Jose next year. I go when it's in San Jose because it's a drive over the hill for me. But I didn't make it to LA this year. So the LA Convention Center. And then we also saw a picture of you in your booth. Yes, MANIS has had a booth there. Has a booth there every year. And you were talking about one thing or another and there you are with a wrapped audience.
- [05:44]
Jeff Urich
Yes, a good group. A good group there some television reviewers actually in the picture here. And I think those are the guys from Ratings. And then, yeah, I'm in front of a RGB Mini LED tv, which is the competing technology. And then the one on the right there is a TCL X11 quantum dot mini LED. So that was the kind of featured demo for our booth.
- [06:05]
Scott Wilkinson
Right? Exactly. So let's start there. Let's start with RGB Mini LED versus Quantum Dot.
- [06:16]
Jeff Urich
Sure. So, yeah, I think we had a couple graphics there, but I can walk you through sort of that demonstration. And this was supported by tcl, actually, which we found very interesting. They have chosen to go with Quantum Dot as the kind of flagship model for this year. And you've probably seen some of the other brands putting forward RGB Mini led.
- [06:39]
Scott Wilkinson
Now, let's quickly reiterate, remind people what RGB Mini LED is.
- [06:46]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, really good. Really good point. So RGB Mini LED is a new kind of backlight. It's funny, it's a new old backlight, like many things in display, you may remember. Gosh, what year was it? The Sony Qualia LED TV, one of the first LED TVs used an RGB Mini LED system. Gosh, I want to. Or not mini LED, just RGB LED.
- [07:12]
Scott Wilkinson
Right.
- [07:12]
Jeff Urich
I want to say 2007, maybe a little earlier, 2004. And what this is is a backlight with discrete red, green and blue LEDs
- [07:24]
Scott Wilkinson
emitting light and passing through an LCD layer. So it's basically an LCD tv.
- [07:31]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, yeah. What's funny, as a quantum dot person, that TV inspired a lot of quantum dot people to want to pursue displays for quantum dots. Because you saw with that Sony Qualia, if we have discrete red, green and blue peaks of light, and we marry that up to an LCD panel with color filters that are red, green and blue, we can be much more efficient. A traditional LED LCD would use a white led, which has a very broad spectrum. And you need to use those filters to filter out the yellow and the orange and the other colors that you don't in cyan, that you don't need
- [08:11]
Scott Wilkinson
for the RGB colors, which means it's pretty inefficient.
- [08:14]
Jeff Urich
Inefficient.
- [08:15]
Scott Wilkinson
There's a lot of light getting lost.
- [08:17]
Jeff Urich
Right. So the discrete red, green and blue LEDs, you have more efficiency and you had better color, more pure, separated colors of red, green and blue. So the QD people looked at that and went, oh, we can do that with quantum dots. And that was sort of part one of the little things that helped spur on some of the early quantum dot display development. And so now RGB Mini LED is back. There were many Challenges with discrete red, green and blue LEDs in the backlight, especially in those early days, the three different colors degraded at different rates. And so as you're watching the TV over a long period of time, the red lifetime is shorter than the blue light lifetime. And so your red brightness is going down at a different rate than your green or your blue.
- [09:06]
Scott Wilkinson
Over years.
- [09:07]
Jeff Urich
Over years. Right. But still it's a challenge. And you also had things with color shift. As they heated up, the wavelength of color might shift. Right. So the technology wasn't quite ready and the industry kind of moved on from it for a while. But some of those challenges have been addressed and it's back and it's multiplied sort of by the mini LED concept. So you probably see some of the brands talking about micro RGB or calling this a micro LED tv. Just. Sure. Familiar marketing for a display world. Right. It is still an LCD tv, but we're calling it micro LED because the size of the individual chips of LED chips inside are below 100 microns and therefore are kind of in this micro size range that you could technically call them micro LEDs. Although you're still looking at an LCD. We're just talking about the size of the light emitters in the backlight.
- [10:10]
Scott Wilkinson
In the backlight.
- [10:11]
Jeff Urich
Right, right. But there's an interesting advantage to this, which is you can modulate the colors in the backlight. That's something you've never been able to do before. So, you know the first LCDs with a cold cathode fluorescent. Right. That bulb was on and it was making white light. White LEDs, same thing. It's a blue LED and a phosphor and so you just get white or nothing. And quantum dots, also blue led. With quantum dots, we can't control the ratio of color in the backlight over
- [10:43]
Scott Wilkinson
time, at least not in the current. Not in the current technology that quantum dots are being used in.
- [10:50]
Jeff Urich
Right.
- [10:51]
Scott Wilkinson
Which, which is. I've talked about it on the show before, which is basically a blue backlight with what's called an enhancement film in front of the backlight with red and green quantum dots. And the blue, it stimulates them to glow and you get red, green and blue. But you can't individually control red, green and blue.
- [11:10]
Jeff Urich
Right, exactly. So you get white light and you get contrast because you can control on an area basis. This part's dark, that part's on, but it's white on.
- [11:19]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah.
- [11:19]
Jeff Urich
Local dimming grayscale, basically.
- [11:21]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah.
- [11:22]
Jeff Urich
But RGB mini LED offers you this ability to now control the color and there's something exciting in that because you can now sort of multiply the backlight by the color filters in the LCD panel. Right. You control the brightness at the panel level of the colors, and now you can also control it in the backlight. And so it offers some new flexibility, potentially more energy efficiency. So, you know, if you're only looking at blue in traditional lcd, you have to make red, green and blue and then throw away the red and the green.
- [12:01]
Scott Wilkinson
Right.
- [12:01]
Jeff Urich
But in this case, you could go only make blue and then only show blue. And so that's, you know, that's an efficiency.
- [12:07]
Scott Wilkinson
And in other words, turn off the red and green LEDs.
- [12:09]
Jeff Urich
Yeah. Never make the light. And so there's a potential value there. And one of the other challenges, but this is where it gets interesting, and this is what our demo was about for RGB mini led, is that you can reduce crosstalk. So one of the challenges with an LCD system is the color filters in the LCD panel are fairly broad and they cross over with each other, just like a speaker crossover. Right, right. And as you push to wider and wider color gamuts, the colors of light, the primaries get closer together. And this is especially difficult between blue and green. The blue and green are close together, but the crosstalk is right there. And so in every system, quantum dot especially, there's some green leaking into the blue channel. But on the RGB mini LED system, you can turn off the green so that it's not leaking through the blue channel and you get a more pure blue color. Which sounds fantastic, right?
- [13:14]
Scott Wilkinson
Sure, sounds great. Sign me up.
- [13:16]
Jeff Urich
Right. But the gotcha is in real content, you're very rarely only looking at a blue screen. Right. And so when you have some green or white or red or anything else mixed in, you need to energize the green LED. And as soon as the LED's energized, now you're creating crosstalk and you're pulling the blue color around as the content changes on the screen. So it's kind of a give and take. So you can do really well on sequential color gamut scores where you sort of put up a blue patch and measure it and then a green and then a red. But you're not doing that in real content. Those colors are all mixed together and so you can create sort of inconsistent results.
- [14:04]
Scott Wilkinson
So it's a give and a take, as you say, a give and a take.
- [14:09]
Jeff Urich
Yep. And there's different strategies and I think we're going to see different brand. Like what I think we see right now is Especially some of the early products. To me, they seem clearly very optimized to score. Set a high score on BT 2020, which means putting the blue and the green very close together. And you know, that gets you really far with that sequential test pattern. Right. But then you really suffer on the crosstalk. Some of the other future products, we may see some other brands take a different tack, where you kind of push the primaries apart and put them more squarely under the color filter and then you can do more with it. I think a lot of the sets right now, I think if you really. The default mode will be not modulating the red, green and blue and just running it in white because they don't want you to see this artifact. But then you're kind of like,
- [15:03]
Scott Wilkinson
why
- [15:03]
Jeff Urich
am I doing this?
- [15:04]
Scott Wilkinson
It's defeating the purpose in a sense. Right. Well, you've got a couple of slides here that illustrate what we're talking about. And I'd love to show people.
- [15:13]
Jeff Urich
Yeah. So These are the two TVs we showed in our booth. The yellow color here is super quantum
- [15:20]
Scott Wilkinson
dot, which is from TCL.
- [15:22]
Jeff Urich
Yep, that's our QDs. And it's TCL's marketing term for these QDs, which are different in some ways. And I can talk a little bit about why. And you see they have very narrow peaks like you'd expect from quantum dots. And then the cyan color here is the RGB mini LED spectrum. And you can see the blue actually, if you start from the left. Now, we often normalize these charts so like the blues will be the same.
- [15:51]
Scott Wilkinson
Same peak, the same height, height, amplitude, height.
- [15:55]
Jeff Urich
Right. But we didn't do that here, so you kind of have to follow along with it. But the Cyan is the RGB, the yellow is the QD. You can see the blue LEDs are essentially the same. I didn't put the specs here. I think they're 447 nanometer. It's like 447 and 447.5 or something
- [16:15]
Scott Wilkinson
close enough for JS.
- [16:17]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, essentially the same LED. And they may well be. Then on the green peaks, you see the RGB native green LED peak, it's a little bit broader. It has a 29 nanometer full width half maximum. And that is the measure of the width of the peak halfway up to the peak. So the width at the half height and the super QD you see is a little bit narrower. It's a 23 nanometer full width half maximum.
- [16:52]
Scott Wilkinson
Also, the peak is at a slightly
- [16:54]
Jeff Urich
different wavelength, a slightly different Wavelength. Now, what's interesting for us is quantum dots. We now have the capability to manufacture almost any color in the visible spectrum. And for displays that's typically between 520 nanometers and 650 nanometers of peak wavelength.
- [17:15]
Scott Wilkinson
That's a wide range for green.
- [17:17]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, green and red, including red in there. Right?
- [17:20]
Scott Wilkinson
Oh, I see what you mean. Right.
- [17:22]
Jeff Urich
We don't make really blue for displays because we take advantage of the blue LED qdel. That's a different story. And we'll talk about that later. But later for lcd, this is what we make, red and green. And so we could make a shorter peak wavelength in that 521 range. But we don't. And the manufacturers generally don't ask us to. We don't get to choose. Right. They tell us what they want and they want a longer green because they want to avoid that crosstalk problem, remember?
- [17:54]
Scott Wilkinson
Ah, it shifts the peak farther away from blue.
- [17:58]
Jeff Urich
Right. We can never turn off the green. And so we have to deal with that crosstalk all the time. And one of the things brands like about quantum dots is they can shift the peaks around depending on their color filter. One thing we learned very early on in displays is we're Silicon Valley tech company. You know, we came into display market with a lot of hubris. And you know, like I remember we had this component idea early on. We're going to put this glass tube on the edge of the TV and we're like, it's a drop in thing. And the display industry was like, that is not a drop in thing. That's a new machine I have to put in my factory. And we're not going to do that. Right. And one of the things we learned early on is they're not going to change the color filter. We kept saying, gee, if you just tightened up the blue filter a little bit and you could even widen the green filter. And they're like, look, no, this factory is running. We have to stop up the factory and you know, take the stuff out and put new stuff in and like calibrate it. And like, they don't want to do that. The factory never stops. So that. Forget it. Right. And so one of the things that they liked about quantum dots was, well, since I'm not going to do that, I can actually now shift the green over here a little bit and reduce my crosstalk or the green of the backlight. The green of the backlight to solve for the color filters which are to
- [19:20]
Scott Wilkinson
match the color filter more closely.
- [19:22]
Jeff Urich
Exactly. Yep. And in some cases maybe you have like, I mean, you have situations where the 55 inch SKU is coming was coming from, you know, Samsung and the display and the 65 is coming from LGD and maybe it's even an IPS or whatever. But like they have different filters from different factories and you know, could we hit different peaks there?
- [19:43]
Scott Wilkinson
Right. Which you can with quantum dots.
- [19:45]
Jeff Urich
Right. And keep the consistency at the front of the screen. But so this is where I think you see them kind of shifting that green shorter and pushing into that crosstalk territory. Because they can turn it off.
- [19:57]
Scott Wilkinson
Right. The rgb, you mean?
- [19:59]
Jeff Urich
Right, the rgb, they can push it
- [20:01]
Scott Wilkinson
towards blue, but they can turn it off.
- [20:03]
Jeff Urich
Right. So they don't sort of pay that penalty on the color gamut measurement.
- [20:07]
Scott Wilkinson
Right.
- [20:08]
Jeff Urich
And then the RGB, they're at 640, 21 nanometers, very, very narrow on the red. On the red. And the QD647 at 23. This is a little detail. A lot of people are asking us at CES what's so super about super qd?
- [20:25]
Scott Wilkinson
Well, it's a marketing term for one thing.
- [20:27]
Jeff Urich
Right. But there is something special to it. And this is one of the areas typically, as you get in longer wavelengths for quantum dots, the full width half maximum will be broader. And the super QD set, we're able to control the full width half maximum a little bit better. So you can go all the way out to 647, almost 650 and still have this 23 nanometer full width HEF max. If we were targeting like a closer to a 640, it would be more like 17nm, so even a little bit narrower. So this is kind of one of the new things for super qt.
- [21:06]
Scott Wilkinson
Okay, let's see. I think the next slide has something of interest.
- [21:13]
Jeff Urich
Yeah. And so like when we're talking about the green peak wavelength, we. This is really one of the most important things for color gamut coverage. So we did this little study where we looked at data from ratings.com. so the X axis here is green full width half maximum in nanometers.
- [21:32]
Scott Wilkinson
So it's basically the width of the peak of green.
- [21:35]
Jeff Urich
The width of the peak of green. Right. And the y axis is BT 2020 10,000 NIT ICTCP coverage. So that's color volume coverage ratings no longer reports the two XY or U prime V prime chromaticity gamut. They only report in volume. So we had to use volume here, which is good.
- [21:58]
Scott Wilkinson
That's a good thing.
- [21:58]
Jeff Urich
Which we agree with. Yes, but it's like it requires that little extra explanation. It's not chromaticity coverage.
- [22:04]
Scott Wilkinson
Right.
- [22:04]
Jeff Urich
There's a luminance component to this as well. And so if you look on the lower right hand side, you see kind of those gray dots there. And those are white LED
- [22:15]
Scott Wilkinson
sets.
- [22:15]
Jeff Urich
And so those are very broad, fourth half maximum and they're the lowest in terms of BT 2020 coverage. You also see some of the older white OLEDs you probably have heard from LGD. Over time they've been improving the color saturation of the color primaries on the white oled. So some of the older sets had relatively broad green peaks. And you can kind of see over time they've gotten narrower and narrower. And actually if you look more towards the upper left, you see a couple of, of a couple of blue dots there. They're getting close to QD territory. They're kind of knocking on the door. So you kind of middle of the chart, some other LCD technologies like ksf, which is another phosphor technology pseudo qd, which is where we see some of the brands mixing in lower amounts of QD with other phosphors. And you can see that that is lower performance in terms of color. But then you see the box on the upper left that that is the QD zone. And so that's where you have most of the QD technologies, including the QD OLEDs are in there. And then super QT is, this is another area where super QD is separated, is way up on its own level at the top there. And it's because it has such a narrow green peak and is capable of such high brightness and RGB mini led of course, you know, getting close, knocking on the door.
- [23:38]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, it's up there. It's certainly up there.
- [23:40]
Jeff Urich
Way up there. Yep. But not quite.
- [23:42]
Scott Wilkinson
Not quite, not quite. Okay. Speaking of BT 2020, which we've been talking about a little bit, this color range, world of colors that a TV can reproduce, tell us about this slide.
- [23:57]
Jeff Urich
So this was like the real point of our demo. We wanted to show this crosstalk in effect in a real situation. So the brands, you're hearing a lot of like eye wateringly, BT 2020 numbers
- [24:10]
Scott Wilkinson
from, oh, 100%, 110%, yes, 130 we've even heard.
- [24:14]
Jeff Urich
Right.
- [24:14]
Scott Wilkinson
Really?
- [24:15]
Jeff Urich
So yeah, so we wanted to like, we never like to talk in terms of chromaticity area because we think coverage is the only number that matters. Right. But we wanted to validate that like there where those numbers are coming from and they are using Area, which just means the size of the triangle, but unrelated to anything though, right? So it could, you know, it could be a triangle anywhere on that chromaticity chart part. And they got a 107, 108% BT 2020 area with the RGB mini LED. And if you look on the kind of X axis here, we're showing that's 100% color patch area. It's not exactly APL. It wouldn't be quite right to say that. What we mean is just a full screen of blue. And then what we did is we did a 10% blue patch and the rest of the screen white. And what you see is the 2020 area starts to come down on the RGB mini LED on the rgb, but the Super QD is flat. And it's actually a live chart. The Super QD really is that flat. There's actual data plotted here. And the 1% color patch with the rest of the screen white. You see, it really is dropping now to I think, 96% BT 2020 area. And that's because that green crosstalk is coming in. So, yep, underneath that patch, only the blue LEDs are lit. But in the surrounding area to make the rest of the screen white, RG and B are on. And you have some of the green crosstalk. It's actually a green halo, right, from the adjacent LED zones that's leaking across into the blue patch, this little 1% blue patch, right. And that, that halo crosstalk from a neighboring zone. This is a new concept, right? You're used to, I'm sure your audience is very used to haloing on full array local dimming sets and mini LEDs. But Halo is always gray because the
- [26:16]
Scott Wilkinson
LEDs have been white.
- [26:17]
Jeff Urich
Right. In this case, the halo has a color aspect to it. You have to think about that and the way the color filters in the panel are designed. And that's where you see this shift. It's less noticeable in BT 2020 coverage, but there you can see that you kind of come down to within 1% of each other, right? 92 to 93% coverage.
- [26:44]
Scott Wilkinson
BT 2020 coverage is volume. That's what you're talking about there.
- [26:47]
Jeff Urich
This is in U Prime, V Prime. So we're sorry, we're mixing things around here a little bit, but this is 1976 chromaticity area.
- [26:55]
Scott Wilkinson
Okay.
- [26:56]
Jeff Urich
And we're using that because that's what the brands are using when they give you Those, those numbers, 110% numbers and things. So. But you can see there too, like it, it's still affected a little bit by the postdoc.
- [27:09]
Scott Wilkinson
Right, exactly. Okay, so. And this was the main demo that you were showing people an RGB mini LED on one side and a, a TCL X11 on the other side, which is using Super QD as they call it.
- [27:25]
Jeff Urich
Yep. Yeah, it was a really fun demo. Both TVs are really nice TVs. I'm going to be perfectly honest here. But we do think TCL's got a good point. And one of the other little tricky things that comes with this that wasn't apparent to me until I was able to spend some real time with these sets is that in this particular case there may be different products out there. The X11 had more zones for the backlight, but was lower cost. And I think that's because it's a fewer number of LED chips in total. Right. So for each LED, you need three chips. Three LEDs, actually. Right. On the RGB mini LED system you
- [28:20]
Scott Wilkinson
need a red, a green and a blue.
- [28:21]
Jeff Urich
Right. And so I forget the numbers off the top of my head, but it was almost like a 3x ratio of effective zones, even though the number of absolute LEDs was relatively similar. And so you could see a contrast advantage in the X11. And so to me, I was like, oh, that's an interesting twist to this as well. And I think, and I'm sure your audience relates to this. Right? Like the number one thing. I mean, I'm a color guy. Right. But I still have to admit the number one thing you care about is contrast, right?
- [28:52]
Scott Wilkinson
Yep.
- [28:53]
Jeff Urich
Contrast, number one. Color is super important. But yeah, I just don't think.
- [28:59]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, if you, if you have a high black level or, or not a super high peak white, it's just not going to look very good. Right.
- [29:05]
Jeff Urich
So the number one thing you want to pay for in a full array set is kind of like the number of zones. I think that's a. Kind of like a really important thing. So.
- [29:12]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now in the, in the last slide there, we saw a little bit about where different technologies rank in terms of how much of the BT 2020 range they cover. The width of the green spectral spike, if you will. And you took that a step further and took a look at ratings. Ratings. Ratings R T I N G is my go to place for TV reviews. And they've now expanded to a bunch of other product categories.
- [29:54]
Jeff Urich
Oh yeah.
- [29:54]
Scott Wilkinson
Headphones and, and all kinds of stuff. Monitors, true.
- [29:58]
Jeff Urich
Sneakers even, I think.
- [30:00]
Scott Wilkinson
Speakers even. Yeah, you're right. But their TV reviews, I think are just Top notch. They're so good. They're so deep and so detailed. And you actually took a bunch of TV reviews and ratings that they had come up with. Their overall rating is called mixed usage. And you plotted them out and you put them in a graphic form that I think is very interesting. Let's take a look at that.
- [30:29]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, exactly. So should note, first of all, they haven't endorsed me doing this, but they have the data there on the site. So I went and read it and compiled it. So this is, you know, my analysis of their data. I want to make sure I'm not sort of totally putting their stamp on it. But I do trust their data.
- [30:47]
Scott Wilkinson
I do, too.
- [30:48]
Jeff Urich
I do too.
- [30:49]
Scott Wilkinson
Absolutely.
- [30:50]
Jeff Urich
And their process and actually a fun little aside on them to give them a little bit of credit. But I actually had an amazing day several years ago. Maybe it's one or two days, but I had someone from. I don't give names. Right here, here. Big manufacturer.
- [31:08]
Scott Wilkinson
Yes.
- [31:08]
Jeff Urich
And say, you know, grumble, grumble, those ratings guys, right. They won't let us send our engineers there. There's a problem with one of our sets and, you know, in their review process, and they won't let you know. So complaining that. About the impartiality that Ratings was bringing to the table. Complaining about impartiality within a day. That brand's number one competitor also called me. Grumble, grumble, grumble. They're doing something with one of our sets, so they won't let us in. And I went like, what? Like, wow. Strongest possible endorsement for those guys.
- [31:43]
Scott Wilkinson
Right?
- [31:44]
Jeff Urich
Universal complaints from the TV brands about them. And I think knowing them a little bit, I assume they like it like that. And it's.
- [31:50]
Scott Wilkinson
Right.
- [31:51]
Jeff Urich
It's fantastic.
- [31:53]
Scott Wilkinson
I believe, am I not correct, that they actually buy their review samples? They don't even get them from the manufacturer.
- [31:59]
Jeff Urich
Exactly. Yeah. They buy their own sets. And so, you know, you get what you get. If you get sort of a great one, you get a great one if it's. And if it's, you know, not the best one. That's what it is.
- [32:07]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Okay, so let's take a look again at this graphic and show us your analysis of the data from ratings.com.
- [32:16]
Jeff Urich
yeah, and so we love ratings. Recently updated, I think they call it version 2 or 2.1. They always increment their review process and they're very transparent about this. And you can go read about it on their site. And one of the things I think they found is that their previous thing they thought was not tough Enough. And I love when they talk like this because they're very tough, I think, already. And they kind of made the test a little bit harder, basically a simple way to put it, but you can go and read about all the details of what they changed. And so we looked here and it's a little bit hard to see, maybe with the compression. But the left, there's kind of a bar chart here near the top. The left one is white LED sets. The next one over is KSF sets. These are sets that use a phosphor. So they're also a white led, but they have a more advanced phosphor with better color. The next bar over is what we call pseudo qd. And now these use a mix of the KSF phosphor mostly and some quantum dots and a varying amount of quantum dots. This is actually a pretty broad range of technologies, but. But it's less than 100% quantum dot. And so we kind of call it pseudo qd. Then you have QD lcd.
- [33:33]
Scott Wilkinson
So the yellow ones, the fourth one over from the left.
- [33:35]
Jeff Urich
Exactly. And so you see the progression, you're kind of getting higher and higher scores. This is looking at mixed. The mixed usage score, which is kind of like the broad. Just what's this TV all about? Right. The overall score, there's a home theater score that rates, you know, probably contrast a little bit higher and other things like that.
- [33:53]
Scott Wilkinson
Right, right. Gaming use is another sub score.
- [33:56]
Jeff Urich
Exactly. Watching sports and brightness is more weighted. Right. They weight the sort of things. But this is mixed usage. So you can see what our headline here is. Quantum dots, we think are the best lcd and we think the ratings data kind of validates that a little bit. Right. They have better color and they're associated with mini LED sets which have better contrast. QDs don't give you the contrast, but they're insets with better contrast. So we kind of benefit from that a little bit. And you can see the cluster of those dots. There are the actual data points. And so you can sort of see these clusters of where these technologies kind of sit.
- [34:36]
Scott Wilkinson
And then the white line is kind of the average of all of them.
- [34:39]
Jeff Urich
Is the average of all of them. Exactly. So there's a pretty broad range there, but you can see the cuties are pretty high end in terms of performance. Next is white oled. And I think this is fair. Right. They value contrast very highly. And OLEDs deliver contrast. Right? Tons of it. And then the last one is QD oled. And so of course, we love to see that. So if you love LCDs, we think Quantum dots have the best solution for you. And if you love OLEDs, we think QDL OLED has got the best solution. And we think you sort of see that validated in the data here. And then there's several other things here showing different subcategories. We definitely cherry pick this. There's a lot of measurements on their site, but a lot, a lot. Right. And so you could come up with different solutions. But again, the overall mix usage score puts the weights in there for you. But HDR peak brightness is the one on the left. HDR BT 2020 coverage is the middle bar chart. And that is coverage again of color volume because one of the changes they made is to only report volume, not chromaticity. The one on the right, bright room score. So that's a place where QT's really excel because they have very high brightness and wide color gam. And then if you look at the colors match the dots above. So QD OLED and QD LCD are on the top in both of those.
- [36:02]
Scott Wilkinson
Right.
- [36:02]
Jeff Urich
All three of them.
- [36:05]
Scott Wilkinson
And then at the bottom you have some analysis of narrow green, wider color.
- [36:12]
Jeff Urich
Yeah. So that's the one we talked about earlier, showing the narrow green peak for QDs and how that helps enable wider color gamut. And then we thought it would be cool to show the actual spectral differences of these different technologies here. This is probably a little bit hard to see with the compression, but you can see the nice peaks of the QDs there. There's some that are very broad. You can see especially between the green and the red, that is the white led. Then in the red region you see the one that has looks like three spikes. That's the ksf, potassium fluorosilicate, red phosphor. So that has a very nar narrow red, but it has a broader green. So just all these different technologies, this is what we think about a lot about is the spectrum of light that these technologies give off and you know, what kind of spectrum can we create? So this is kind of, that's kind of our world.
- [37:10]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a great analysis of the, of the results that Ratings got and they are completely non discriminatory. They don't, they don't care who made what. They just are, are reviewing these TVs and, and giving the results, which is the way it should be done.
- [37:29]
Jeff Urich
Yeah. And one of the little details I love is they share the spectral data on their site. So you can.
- [37:33]
Scott Wilkinson
I know, it's amazing.
- [37:34]
Jeff Urich
Yeah. For any tv. So Compare a claim. If a manufacturer says X is in here and you look and maybe it's not X sometimes. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Do your own research.
- [37:44]
Scott Wilkinson
Exactly. I also love the little section in their reviews called panel technology. Which reveals whether it's quantum dot or not.
- [37:52]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, exactly.
- [37:54]
Scott Wilkinson
Even when a manufacturer might claim it's QLED or it's quantum dot or whatever and that you look at that review of that TV and it says it's phosphorus, right?
- [38:05]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, they're pretty direct about it.
- [38:06]
Scott Wilkinson
So it's very good. Very good.
- [38:09]
Jeff Urich
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- [38:46]
Scott Wilkinson
of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent
- [38:48]
Jeff Urich
to $15 per month required intro rate
- [38:50]
Scott Wilkinson
first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com okay, so the next thing I want to talk about. I've shown this graphic before, but I'd love for us to talk about it a little bit. And that is the quantum dot roadmap. You work for Nanisys, which is the makers of quantum dots. You don't make product for consumers, you make product for manufacturers to use. And there are different ways you can use quantum dots in a display. So why don't you take us through this real quick?
- [39:26]
Jeff Urich
Sure, absolutely. So, yeah, the top part of this chart is qdef. That's quantum dot enhancement film. And you're absolutely right. What we make are quantum dots. But going back to those early days that I mentioned, one of the things we learned very quickly is that, that nobody cares that we made these glowing materials. The display industry was like, good for you guys. Nice. We go into these big display makers with these glowing vials and go like, look, you could put this in a display and they're like, sounds maybe, but
- [40:00]
Scott Wilkinson
they had no clue yet.
- [40:01]
Jeff Urich
Not our problem to solve. And so we spent a lot of time developing components. Even though we knew we wanted to be a naughty component maker, we would not have the capital scale to, you know, go and make these components. Right. It was hard enough to make the QDS alone. Yeah. But we still had to design them. So we had this one idea which was like this glass tube and we were like, you glue it to the light guide and the explainers are like, nope, try again. So we came up with this idea of quantum dot enhancement film, which at the time seemed crazy because it required more quantum dots because you're going to cover the whole area of the screen with qds. But it worked in the existing process, the lcd, you can see this chart at the top consists of a number of layers. All displays do just about the size of the layers. But LCDs use these kind of macro sized layers which are like the polarizer, the color filter, the liquid crystal, the glass. But you have these films, like a polarizer film, brightness enhancing films, diffuser films. There's a film stack inside of an lcd. And so there's already this concept in LCD manufacturing of these plastic films that do optical work on the light from
- [41:23]
Scott Wilkinson
coming from the background stacked on top of each other.
- [41:25]
Jeff Urich
And they're stacked on top of each other. So we were like, okay, there's a place we can paint quantum dots onto one of those films. We can, you know, truly drop into the way LCDs are made without changing the process, which was the clear feedback that we had. So we had to go ask them to change the LEDs in the backlight from white to blue. And then we would do, we would make the red and green in this film. We called it qdef. And that is basically what is in almost every product on the market today, aside from QD oled, which we'll talk about in a second. Right. More recently we developed a new type of component with one of our partners in China called, we call it xqdef. The industry calls it quantum dot diffuser plate, or qdp. And this, this is a little bit lower cost. Instead of a film that we coat with quantum dots, we actually take the diffuser plate, which is this hard plastic thing that sits right on top of the LEDs in a full array, local dimming or mini LED set. And we just extrude that piece of plastic with the quantum dots already inside. And so you don't have to pay for the extra pieces of plastic. You're kind of already making that diffuser plate and now you're just making one with QDs in it.
- [42:39]
Scott Wilkinson
So yeah, you're basically removing one of the layers.
- [42:43]
Jeff Urich
Exactly.
- [42:44]
Scott Wilkinson
By putting quantum dots in one of the already existing layers.
- [42:48]
Jeff Urich
Yep. And so industry like Likes that even more. That's great. Yeah. Lower cost. And so initially there was some brightness and color hit to this. We weren't able to get the same wavelengths and it was a little bit less bright. But actually this year we've been able to match the brightness of QDEF with this product. So the QD diffuser plate is kind of coming on strong as like not just kind of an entry level technology, but it's kind of working its way into more and more sets. And for the user's perspective, there's really like no difference.
- [43:19]
Scott Wilkinson
No difference.
- [43:20]
Jeff Urich
Sure. LCDs in both cases. Right. But shows like one of the key things from the quantum dot side is improving the stability of the materials has been like one of the main thrusts that we've been working on this whole time. The color has been there the whole time, really. Right. But how do we integrate these into things that we can make? Initially we needed a lot of barrier protection. That's why the films really helped. But now these are kind of air stable materials. And then you go to the QD oled, which is kind of the next, next step on the chart there. And now we're inkjet printing quantum dots onto the top of the display. So you can see the blue light is coming from an OLED in this case.
- [44:03]
Scott Wilkinson
So this is the QDCC quantum dot color conversion. Right.
- [44:07]
Jeff Urich
And we say QDCC because it can apply to microled as well as oled. But OLED is the only thing we see commercialized in the market right now with QD OLEDs. Right. And so you have this stack of blue OLED emitters and they're emitting blue light. And then right on top of them you have inkjet printed red quantum dots and green quantum dots. And then the blue is just clear, it just passes through the blue from the pixel. So you have sub pixel level control of the color and of course, great contrast from oled. And you get the benefits of the QD color in an oled. A large panel OLED led.
- [44:49]
Scott Wilkinson
Right. So Sony has one, Samsung has one, there might be a couple others, but those are the two big names.
- [44:55]
Jeff Urich
Yep. On the TV side and we've seen a proliferation of monitors on, on the monitor side from a variety of different brands. And yeah, this, this is my favorite TV technology.
- [45:07]
Scott Wilkinson
Mine too.
- [45:08]
Jeff Urich
Yeah,
- [45:10]
Scott Wilkinson
I have one.
- [45:11]
Jeff Urich
Great. Yeah, I'm an owner too. And they, they look amazing and really a good mix of the contrast and the color. Quantum dots have an interesting optical property too. They're what's called isotropic emitters which means they emit in three dimensions in all directions at random. And I think you feel that in the set, like the viewing angle is just a little different than even other OLEDs because the cuties are emitting color in every direction. And you can really look at it like almost, almost 179 degrees and it
- [45:47]
Scott Wilkinson
still looks pretty good.
- [45:48]
Jeff Urich
Yeah.
- [45:49]
Scott Wilkinson
So can't get. No. LCD looks that good at that. Far off.
- [45:53]
Jeff Urich
No, no way. But this is an example of that stability, being able to print it. One of the things we found here too is the manufacturer. We were like, let's do this under vacuum. So the quantum dots don't go into oxygen, which could damage them in the early days. And they're like, no,
- [46:13]
Scott Wilkinson
too large.
- [46:16]
Jeff Urich
Okay, we'll make sure it works. So you print them and then the panels can be in open air for like 24 hours and then they're ultimately kind of sealed together in the final product. But those are some of like the really deep underlying, like what my company works a lot on is improving that stability and enabling QDs to be used this way. How do we put it into an ink that we can jet out of an inkjet printer nozzle that's printing a 4K display really fast. Right. And so the droplets have to come out, they have to be perfectly formed and all of kind of things. A lot of deep, deep, you know, chemistry.
- [46:50]
Scott Wilkinson
Right, right, exactly. Well, this is why I find it so fascinating, really. And then the final step in the roadmap, which we're going to talk about here in just a minute, is the Holy grail.
- [47:05]
Jeff Urich
Yes.
- [47:06]
Scott Wilkinson
QD electroluminescent.
- [47:09]
Jeff Urich
Yep. And we had. I think it'll come up in one of the pictures. We had even a new name. Enter the. Enter the race for this. Oh, yeah, from sdc. I forget what it is. Maybe we'll see it when that picture comes up. But qdel, we've got Nano, led, we've got Q led, qd led. Right. This has a lot of different names.
- [47:28]
Scott Wilkinson
A lot of different names from different companies.
- [47:30]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, everybody's calling it something different. When Samsung started calling the LCD TVs QLED. QLED was the original name for this because it's like a light emitting diode with quantum dots. And you're looking.
- [47:43]
Scott Wilkinson
They absconded with that name and used it, I think mismisleadingly.
- [47:49]
Jeff Urich
Yep. A little bit of marketing there perhaps. And so now everybody's scrambling and I think ultimately we'll just call this QLED at the end of the day and go, well, now here's the real qled. The real qled.
- [48:00]
Scott Wilkinson
So how does this work?
- [48:01]
Jeff Urich
We'll see what happens. So the way this works is just like an OLED display. You take electrons and holes and you pump them into this emitter material which are in this case instead of organic materials, in the case of OLEDs, organic light emitting diodes. These are actually inorganic and they're quantum dot inorganic nanocrystals that are quantum dots. And so these are like in fact almost the same materials that we use in the other systems, but we're just pumping them in a different way. So you need a slightly different kind of overall stack to get those electrons and holes in compared to an oled. But just functionally it's a very, very similar kind of design and a very similar kind of display. And you can inkjet print them and you can pattern them with photolithography. And we see these two different approaches from the manufacturing side kind of in a race to see who will commercialize first. The feedback we get or question we get is sort of like why, right? OLED is pretty good. And in fact this is one of the things I think you see that's a big challenge for micro LED sets, right? People are talking about like what would it put a micro LED in a watch? Well like OLED's doing a really good job there, right? And so why like it's another emissive display. Again like I have OLED and it's very good. OLED in my smartphone and my watch, right? Even qd OLED in a tv, right? Or white oled, right? These are great, great contrast. And you know, I'm pretty satisfied actually. Like how much further can you take me? And so one of the big advantages for qdel we think over time is going to be the manufacturing advantage. And so, so these should be lower cost displays to manufacturer. Especially if you can take advantage of the inkjet printing capability. You don't need quite as complex of a device. You probably don't need as complex of a fab. You're not doing it under vacuum with as complex of equipment as opposed to microled. Microled is totally different world where, where moving those pixels, transferring them and getting them to work is like a really, really hard, hard manufacturing challenge.
- [50:13]
Scott Wilkinson
And by micro LED in this case, what we're talking about is direct view led, red, green and blue, sort of like video walls. Samsung's the wall, Sony's crystal led. This is a very expensive technology that isn't really available to most consumers yet. And what you're saying is it's going to remain expensive because the manufacturing is very complex. Whereas QDEL actually is going to be easier and less expensive to do.
- [50:46]
Jeff Urich
Easier and less expensive to do. Yeah. So one of the key things like for you've seen, you've seen actually TCL has talked a lot about this, of getting OLED materials to be ink jettison has been a very big challenge. Right. But QDs start from a solution process state and we're already using them in inks and qd, OLED and in other places. And so we think that it's going to be the best solution for solution process printing of displays and you can make lower cost displays. The people doing photolithography are thinking even more aggressively about this and actually thinking if we can get photolithography working, we can now make electroluminescent displays on LCD manufacturing lines. And that's sort of like the big home run view, right. It's much harder to get there. But if you can now you can take your Gen 10 fab, that's making LCD TVs today and make electroluminescent quantum dot displays with it. Now that's not anytime soon. So let's be really clear about that. Right. But that's kind of like, why are people working on this? That's kind of where they want to go to. And that's kind of the dream of this technology.
- [51:56]
Scott Wilkinson
So what are we talking about? Three years, five years? I mean, I'm not going to hold you to this, but I mean, are we talking a few years? Are we talking a decade? I mean, what's the ballpark?
- [52:08]
Jeff Urich
We'll see. It's been a hard challenge to work on. So we have been saying 2029 and I can tell you, we said 2029 at CES and we're still saying 2029 in May. So it hasn't.
- [52:21]
Scott Wilkinson
In five months, the goalpost hasn't moved,
- [52:25]
Jeff Urich
we haven't pushed it back. So that's kind of the best I can do for you. But all right. It's a very difficult challenge. I would say what we see is the reds are pretty much commercially ready. The greens are very, very close, just like oled. The blue is the biggest challenge.
- [52:44]
Scott Wilkinson
Highest energy output.
- [52:46]
Jeff Urich
Exactly. It's a tough physics challenge. And I like this line that I picked up about, which is true, we don't see any physics limits to the blue yet. It's still continuing to improve. We haven't run into some wall where it's like, oh my gosh, there's no way through this that we can see, right? But one of the OLED guys told me, yeah, we used to say that too until we hit that wall. So I was like, okay, maybe I shouldn't use that line so much. But yeah, we still see a lot of room for improvement. Improvement. It's a rapid progress in that area. In fact, there were a number of papers at Display Week on specifically blue electroluminescent QD from companies like Samsung Display and TCL and you know, boe. And so major players are working really hard on this.
- [53:36]
Scott Wilkinson
You got a couple pictures here that I want to show people. One of some new development in QD oled.
- [53:42]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, yeah, this was cool. To see where Samsung Display showed a view of the tandem OLED stack. One of the things like with QD oled and you see this on the white OLED side as well is how do you get the brightness out of oled? One of the first things people ask when they heard about QD OLED is like, but you can't build on top of blue oled. Right? Blue OLED is sort of the worst oled. It's not as bright, it's. It has a lifetime problem. Right. And so if you're driving blue OLED hard enough to make, take blue photons and convert them into red and green, is that a recipe for success? SDC found is that, you know, they could put three layers of blue OLED emitter and stack them up and then in that case you can run them at lower current. So the lifetime is quite good. The brightness is even higher. It's a tandem OLED style stack that people have been talking about. That sort of tandem language has become more popular, but it's been this way for a long time.
- [54:44]
Scott Wilkinson
I think LG uses the word tandem in their regular oled.
- [54:51]
Jeff Urich
Exactly. I think Apple was this introduced when Apple did the iPad as a tandem RGB OLED stack. And then people sort of gravitated to that language. But this is how it's been. White OLEDs even are tandem stacks. The original white OLEDs are, were a blue OLED, a yellow OLED and another blue OLED. And they've evolved that stack as well over time by adding more color and more layers. And so you see Samsung doing that here. They had three blues and a green in the original stack. So it was actually a four layer tandem. And this year they've added a second green emitter. So you have blue, blue, green, blue, green on the penta Tandem. And I love this. It's like the Gillette, you know, razor blade thing, like they're just right. You started with 2 and then 3 and then 4 and then 5. So you just keep adding razor blades to your.
- [55:43]
Scott Wilkinson
Okay, and we got a couple pictures that you took of QD electroluminescent as well.
- [55:48]
Jeff Urich
Yes. Okay, so yeah, here's the name. Qed. So that was the new. I hadn't seen QED before. So now
- [55:58]
Scott Wilkinson
that's the end of a mathematical proof, something like that. Qed, right? Quo era demonstratus. I remember this from my math classes.
- [56:06]
Jeff Urich
Okay, there you go. So yeah, so even here you see ELQD, but then it says quantum.electroluminescent display QED. So the industry's still working on that piece of it. But this was from Samsung and this is associated with a paper that was actually all about improvements in blue. They had two displays. One was an 18.2, one was a 6.55. I think I might have the other photo here too.
- [56:29]
Scott Wilkinson
I think the next one is the.
- [56:32]
Jeff Urich
Yep, so here's that. Not sure why they had the keyboard attached to it, but it was like kind of phablet size display showing actually the spectrum of light that the QDs give off. One of the cool things in electroluminescent quantum dot displays is the QDs themselves have very pure emission spectrum. That's why they're great in LCDs too. But RGB OLED phones for example use something called a micro cavity. So the actual emission spectrum of the OLED material is quite broad and kind of funky looking, has kind of a funny shape to it. And so they use these tricks like a micro cavity to tighten up the emission spectrum. But that can cause some off axis viewing issues. You might notice that on like especially if you have like an OLED phone, you can see some color shift in the green. And so QDs don't need those kind of cavities, they just emit pure colors.
- [57:27]
Scott Wilkinson
Right.
- [57:28]
Jeff Urich
And so yeah, this was I think 400 nits on the small size and 500 nits on the 18.2 inch, which is might be the brightest electroluminescent QD display I've seen. So it was really, it was quite something from Samsung.
- [57:42]
Scott Wilkinson
And then the next picture. Oh, that's just some specs. By the way, you mentioned SDC that Samsung Display Corporation, which is separate from Samsung Electronics.
- [57:56]
Jeff Urich
Exactly.
- [57:57]
Scott Wilkinson
And Samsung Display Corporation makes panels for Samsung Electronics and other companies as, as well as. Well there's also an LG display which is the same. And this company, TCL CSOT. I don't know how you pronounce it, CSOT.
- [58:14]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, I hear it both ways. Mostly CSOT, though. Yeah.
- [58:16]
Scott Wilkinson
Okay, so that's TCL's version of their display research and development arm that makes display panels. Raw panels, not finished consumer products.
- [58:28]
Jeff Urich
Yep, exactly. And that's what you get at Display Week. Right. It's the sdc, it's the lgd, it's the csot kind of behind those vertically integrated brands. And as you indicated, there's a lot of. Kind of really interesting frenemy dynamics behind where they're all selling to each other, but they're competing at the different layers. Right.
- [58:51]
Scott Wilkinson
Very interesting, actually.
- [58:53]
Jeff Urich
Yeah. In fact, you may have seen that Samsung Electronics is buying white OLED panels from LG Display. Right. And then putting them in their lineup. But now we've heard LG Electronics is buying qd oled. They will. For monitors, maybe from Samsung, Samsung Display. So, you know, those are like. I mean, I'm from the east coast, like Yankees and Red Sox. Right. Lg. And they don't trade players back and forth there for their. You know, but so now we're blood feud.
- [59:24]
Scott Wilkinson
Right.
- [59:24]
Jeff Urich
But behind the scenes, you see a little bit of cooperation. Yeah. Yeah.
- [59:27]
Scott Wilkinson
Okay. All right. So quantum dot electroluminescent is coming along, and we see that every year at Display Week, it gets better and better. Screens get bigger, they get brighter. We see more progress there, which is great.
- [59:44]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, it really, like a couple of three years ago, I mean, you were seeing a smaller display with some very obvious sort of mirror effects or defects on it, dead pixels, that kind of thing. And so it's a good signal that, you know, we're getting.
- [59:58]
Scott Wilkinson
We're getting there.
- [59:59]
Jeff Urich
Yeah.
- [60:00]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah.
- [60:00]
Jeff Urich
Both of these guys, by the way, are doing the inkjet approach for. For manufacturing. And I think you see these two companies are very aligned around Inkjet, where SDC has it for qd, OLED as well. And TCL talks a lot about rgb, oled, that inkjet printing products that they're moving forward. What was Sharp also did something privately.
- [60:22]
Scott Wilkinson
I don't.
- [60:22]
Jeff Urich
I can't show a picture of it, but they're doing the photolithography approach. And they also had a really cool demo, too.
- [60:26]
Scott Wilkinson
Oh, cool. Okay. One other thing I wanted to talk about. Well, two other things. One is
- [60:35]
Jeff Urich
you.
- [60:36]
Scott Wilkinson
Another what's called oem, Original equipment manufacturer. The sort of. The company behind the scenes that's making panels is called boe.
- [60:47]
Jeff Urich
Yes.
- [60:47]
Scott Wilkinson
Which is a Chinese company. They don't make any. I don't think they make any consumer products. Nope. Just. Just the raw stuff for manufacturers to then make final products. And they had something interesting.
- [61:02]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, they, they might be the biggest in the world in terms of just raw LCD panel capacity. I'm not sure about that. CSOT will be close, but BOE is a big player behind the scenes. And also they sell to everybody. So, you know, all of the end brands will potentially use boe. And this was their. They called it, and you can see it on the sign on the left, RGBX line of products. And we saw some of these products at ces. These are introducing a fourth color to the backlight. So these are RGB mini LED systems with a next trim extra letter added. And so they're using X here. But the first one we're seeing a lot of is cyan. So R technically would be rgcb red, green, cyan, blue. Right. In that order. And you can see it and maybe you can zoom in on it. Or maybe I have a.
- [61:59]
Scott Wilkinson
The next picture has your spectrum analyzer closer up.
- [62:02]
Jeff Urich
Right. So you can actually see these four peaks here. The blue on the left, then the cyan, then the green, and then that really deep red from this product. So this is a very interesting area. I really honestly don't quite know what to make of this. I think adding additional primaries beyond red and green and blue is interesting, but I do question whether LCD is the right architecture to, to do that because of the cross color filter, crosstalk issues we talked about earlier.
- [62:41]
Scott Wilkinson
Right, right. I mean, who was it? Sharp did it years and years ago with their quatron.
- [62:48]
Jeff Urich
Right. Yeah, they had a great. What's his name? Sulu.
- [62:51]
Scott Wilkinson
Oh, yeah, yeah. George Takei.
- [62:53]
Jeff Urich
Yeah.
- [62:53]
Scott Wilkinson
Oh my. Right.
- [62:56]
Jeff Urich
Great advertising.
- [62:57]
Scott Wilkinson
Right, Great advertising.
- [62:58]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, but it, but. And they had a yellow.
- [63:01]
Scott Wilkinson
So subpixel.
- [63:01]
Jeff Urich
Yellow subpixel. And that made sense for the time because they're using white LEDs, which have a lot of yellow energy. And that's what we were talking about earlier. You're throwing. I mean, I'm imagining an engineer is looking at this going, gee, why are we throwing away all this yellow? Let's let some of it pass through. You get more brightness, more efficiency. But the challenge is there's no yellow signal in the data. In the signal. Right. It's not there. The director never added yellow as a channel. And so the director's intention, intent is immediately messed with by doing this. Right. You're adding a color that wasn't there. And you can do the math and go, well, there's a lot of red and green on at the same time, which is summing to make a Yellow. Right. So therefore we'll just introduce a yellow, but it's a little bit different. And so the same goes for cyan or any other color you want to add. So I think this is a very interesting area, but I want to see us have, have a signal that can deliver some data that will allow you to take advantage better of it. And I think lcd, you have this crosstalk issue. So when you see those three peaks all summed together, your eye kind of perceives the dominant wavelength there, which is kind of in the middle around cyan. And you're not getting necessarily this brand new, really saturated color added to the story. So I think a lot more exploration needs to happen here to see, see to see how these work and what benefit you really got.
- [64:32]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, yeah, still interesting, interesting.
- [64:34]
Jeff Urich
And we'll see it. I mean, we're going to see it. Like, we're going to see a bunch of these and we're going to see a variety of different things. One of the things I think is interesting is we went around csot, had one as well, actually. And you can see like, well, they're at 490 nanometer cyan, they're at 470 over here. And that's where again, you start going, well, A, there's no content there, but now B, like, which cyan is it going to be if it were. Right. And so quite, quite a different look.
- [64:59]
Scott Wilkinson
I think, I think your point about there not being any secondary colors in the signal coming into the TV is a strong argument against it, in my opinion.
- [65:11]
Jeff Urich
Right. And we talked a little about this offline beforehand. There's some idea that there's a health component to this too, which is another thread that's just bubbling like you just. It's getting louder and louder and louder in the background of what is the health impact of these displays on, on human beings? And are some wavelengths better than others? And like, it's. There's some research, but it's very limited. Right. You're going to see manufacturers running way ahead of that, though, and claiming a lot of things here. But yeah, you know, is cyan better than blue at different times of day? I don't know. I don't want to make any claims about that, but I think that's perhaps part of what may come from. Along with this.
- [65:51]
Scott Wilkinson
Okay, well, this is actually an interesting subject to me, the whole wellness thing.
- [65:56]
Jeff Urich
Right.
- [65:56]
Scott Wilkinson
And how light affects our health. It's a subject I want to talk about on a different show. So maybe I'll invite you back and we could talk More about that.
- [66:05]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, definitely.
- [66:06]
Scott Wilkinson
For the last point on this show is just a little fun.
- [66:10]
Jeff Urich
Yeah.
- [66:12]
Scott Wilkinson
We.
- [66:12]
Jeff Urich
You.
- [66:13]
Scott Wilkinson
You sent me a. A couple pictures of some quantum dot toys made by Pete Palamaki, who a real quantum dot expert. And let's take a look at this. This is really fun.
- [66:27]
Jeff Urich
Yeah. There's the lightsaber that Pete made. Actually, these are using quantum dots that are quantum dot technology. And we worked with this company called Quantum Light, founded by this artist, and she had this idea of using quantum dots as pigments, and she was actually making paintings with them. And she's been trying to commercialize quantum dots in new areas. And she worked with a company called Proto Pasta, and they make 3D printer filament. And
- [66:59]
Scott Wilkinson
you impregnate the 3D printer filament with quantum dots.
- [67:02]
Jeff Urich
Yes. And then you can make whatever you want with it, man. Yeah.
- [67:06]
Scott Wilkinson
So that is so cool.
- [67:09]
Jeff Urich
It's really cool. And we're getting a lot of really interesting feedback on it. It's a new area for QDs. Like, one of the exciting things for Quantum dot right now is having scaled up and been beaten up by the display industry, getting the reliability and the lifetime and the brightness of the materials up. We can. And. And, you know, really the reliability. And again, that. That stability. We can now start to do new things, like extruding them into these 3D printer filaments. And you can make them actually have one here. I don't know if I can do it. Let's see it. Man.
- [67:39]
Scott Wilkinson
Man.
- [67:39]
Jeff Urich
Do the full reveal. It's great. Massive credit to Pete for thinking. I don't know if I would have been creative enough to think of the lightsaber as the kind of killer app for this. Oh, man. It's pretty cool.
- [67:55]
Scott Wilkinson
May the force be with you. That is great.
- [67:58]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, so there's, you know, he brought a bunch of them for people, and there's.
- [68:01]
Scott Wilkinson
And there's one more picture of more toys.
- [68:05]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, right. He made a dragon. And I love these quantum dots. You got the core shell, quantum dots.
- [68:11]
Scott Wilkinson
Oh, look. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [68:13]
Jeff Urich
And the green cuties are smaller, so he made, like, a smaller cutie shape with a green.
- [68:17]
Scott Wilkinson
Oh, man. What is there. Is there like a little LED inside of these?
- [68:21]
Jeff Urich
No, that's just external blue.
- [68:23]
Scott Wilkinson
External light. So you're shining blue light on these guys?
- [68:26]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, and they're just, you know, getting pumped and glowing. And there you can see the actual spool of the filament there that the. The shamrock is sitting on top of, so.
- [68:34]
Scott Wilkinson
Oh, right. Okay.
- [68:36]
Jeff Urich
Yeah. It's a really Fun new area and really excited to kind of see where this goes and where quantum dots are going to.
- [68:44]
Scott Wilkinson
Oh man, that is so awesome. I want to get one of those lightsabers. I think that's super. That must have a light source inside of it.
- [68:52]
Jeff Urich
It does actually. It was very clever design. It has a UV flashlight inside the main part of the sword there and so you turn that on and glow from the inside. So. Excellent, excellent. Yeah. Pretty, pretty fun thing.
- [69:06]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it sounds like it was a great show. I'm sorry I missed it.
- [69:10]
Jeff Urich
Yeah.
- [69:11]
Scott Wilkinson
Next year it'll be in San Jose again.
- [69:13]
Jeff Urich
San Jose, no excuse. A pretty, pretty easy drive for you over the.
- [69:16]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, yeah, it's a very easy drive for me. So I will, I will be there next year for sure. Yeah. There are, as I mentioned, there's, there are actually two topics that were big at Display Week this year year that we're not going to talk about here, but on separate shows because they're big topics.
- [69:32]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, sure.
- [69:33]
Scott Wilkinson
One of them is this whole wellness thing and, and you know, is it, woo woo. Is it snake oil or is there really something to it? You've actually got a couple people who you trust to be able to talk about it on a real scientific level. So we'll, we'll get them on the show and talk about it. The other is, we've been talking about it all, all this episode. BT 2020. The color, it's not color space, it's not a gamut. I, I, I've, I've struggled with what to call the entirety of BT 2020. The range of colors that could be reproduced.
- [70:10]
Jeff Urich
Yeah.
- [70:11]
Scott Wilkinson
Or be represented, shall we say?
- [70:13]
Jeff Urich
Yeah.
- [70:15]
Scott Wilkinson
And the inventor of BT 2020, Kichiro Mas.
- [70:21]
Jeff Urich
Yeah.
- [70:21]
Scott Wilkinson
Was actually at Display Week and he gave a talk on it and I would love to get you back on since he's in Japan. Kind of difficult to reach.
- [70:30]
Jeff Urich
Sure.
- [70:31]
Scott Wilkinson
You know, but, but you helped him with his graphics and you, you're well versed in the whole subject. So maybe you could come back and we could talk about that particular subject another time.
- [70:40]
Jeff Urich
Yeah, I would love to. Yeah. I learned a few things about, from him about the creation of that and where it came from and how what he was thinking about and, and yeah, we'd love to talk about that.
- [70:49]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah. Good, good. Well, we'll have you back for now though. Thank you so much for being here and sharing with us so much about Quantum Dots at Display Week 2026.
- [70:59]
Jeff Urich
Thanks, Scott. Love it. Good to see you.
- [71:01]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, thank you. So that's Jeff Urich vice president of marketing at Nanisys, the makers of Quantum Dots for everybody. And I thank him so much for being here. Here. Now, if you have a question for me, send it on along to HTG TWIT TV and I'll answer as many as I can right here on the show. And if you have a home theater you're proud of, send me some pics. I'd love to see them. And maybe feature your your room on the show. Until next time, geek
- [71:38]
Jeff Urich
Sa.