 So we're here at the CES 2015 and who are you? I'm Paul Gray from IHS Display Search and this is my colleague Paul Ganyan. So what do you do? We really specialise on analysing the TV business. Our overall research covers the whole display industry but we're the specialists on TV. So 4K is working out, right? It's getting popular and it's a good solution for the display industry. It's happening, there's no doubting that and certainly our forecasts show that by 2018 and if you're buying a TV of 50 inch or bigger then really they're going to be 4K. There'll be a tiny minority in a few sizes that won't be 4K but essentially 4K is done. 2018? By then the transition is completely over and this year as you can see a quarter or so at least will be 4K. It's still most popular in China but really accelerating very rapidly in all other regions. So Samsung did good work and Sharp is doing good work? Everybody is doing it. Let's be very clear that not doing 4K is not a choice anymore. What we're seeing this year is I think some better bricks being built into that whole foundation. So whereas last year all we heard about was resolution, this year what we're now seeing is things to make that really rich balance performance. It's much more than resolution and this year it's really about colour as you can see. Everybody's talking about quantum dot technology and we will see the rich colours that go with it. Quantum dot and Samsung is calling it nano pixel something? It's quantum dot technology. It's essentially the same technology. Who's quantum dot? That's a company? Quantum dot is a different way of constructing materials and by doing that you get extremely pure and saturated light by comparison with the conventional phosphors that go into the white LEDs that we have at present in other techniques. And so you get very very rich reds, rich blues, rich greens. Which is just amazing. Which is fantastic and if you're a cinematographer then you suddenly find that on video you can deliver the same rich colours that you could on really high quality film stock. And so for a cinematographer this is really exciting stuff. You get to the same sort of colours that the human eye can see whereas before the reds looked very brown for example. The greens weren't very deep and the blues were somewhat washed out. So when we did the video a year and a half ago the 4K was 4K dollars right? But now it's less than 1K sometimes. So how cheap does it get? Paul what was it from Black Friday? Was it cheaper? 4.99 or something like that? Yeah, $500 or less easily. I think that we saw many entry level type 4K products from a wide variety of manufacturers fall below $1000. Even top tier manufacturers, Samsung for example, down below $1000. It's not hard to do. The premiums for the LCD panels are very low. You're talking about 10-20% at most. So it's very easy for any manufacturer to introduce a very low cost 4K set. That's what we're seeing. But now we're starting to see more diversification in terms of the 4K lineup. Where you're seeing kind of an entry level, step up and premium level of 4K product from many manufacturers. Because I saw yesterday at Febcom there was Seiki and they were saying the number 3 in the US is a truno. But they're like... It depends on how you slice that number. What's the difference between a Seiki and a Samsung or a Sharp? What's the difference? There are significant differences. If you find that the lower end products tend to have to sacrifice on things like refresh rate, image scaling technology, image processing technology, industrial design, other features like smart TV. Those things usually have to get traded away to keep the cost down on some of those entry level sets. So it's not all the same? A 4K is not all the same? No, it's like saying, is a Chevrolet the same as a Mercedes S-Class? Well they got four wheels and they moved down the road but there's an awful lot more to it than that. And certainly if you look at the entry level 4K ones they're quite good as desktop monitors. But they don't have the subtlety of the video processing and they don't have the attention to detail. And certainly what I think is very very clear about doing 4K is the attention to detail to get it all right. It's more than pixels. It's about pixels plus color plus fast refresh rate plus contrast. And get all those things really right and then you have something where suddenly that little magic thing, in the monkey brain deep inside it says that's real. If you get it wrong then you look at it and you say it's paint by numbers or it doesn't look quite real. And the whole point of 4K or Ultra HD is increased sense of reality. So you have to do all these things and you can't just do one. And all these things are different places in the TV? Or is it just the engine? It's the engine plus the display plus the amount of memory that you have to make sure that you're not throwing any information away during your video processing. And then probably as it's an ownership proposition it's about the quality of the reliability and the heat management so that in five years time the thing is still going to be working. A high quality 4K set is much more holistic. Manufacturers have to think about not just the quality of the individual pixel itself but the complete package and I think that's what you see from some of the best quality TV makers is that the complete package has more attention to detail and more thoughtfulness not just the actual LCD display. So when they talk about better colors is the backlight technology is it? Correct. That's what Quantum Dot is. So Quantum Dot is a new way of converting the basic light that comes out of the LEDs into a nice broad spectrum of white. And by having richer red screens and blues you are able to produce more colors. And so if you consider it to a piano then you've suddenly got another 20 keys on the piano and you can do much more notes and you can offer more detail. And you can give more subtle gradations of shading and color. And we all know what it looks like on blue skies where you can see banding in the color. Now with Quantum Dot you can have more colors but at the same time you've got to process your video with more steps in it. You need 10 or 12 bits in the video rather than 8 because otherwise you still get that banding. And in fact it makes it worse because you've got more reach on your ladders so you need more steps and that's where you get the money. And it's not just about color too, it's about dynamic range. So contrast levels. So there are companies out there working towards expanding the range of contrast levels to high dynamic range companies like Dolby, Technicolor and others are pursuing this other path towards better pixels as a higher dynamic range for the contrast levels. So I was just at the Printed Electronics Conference and what's going on with the OLED 4K printing machines? Are they working? I think that printing displays has been the holy grail for 20 years. We're not quite there yet. Everybody is working on the idea that in the end you'll have water-soluble OLED materials and with water-soluble ones you can then print it on an inkjet printer. And that will be truly transformative when it happens. When it happens? When does it happen? We still don't know, it's still not solved. And I think the lesson out of OLED for the last three years is that it's been promised a lot and we're in that stage where many of the basic problems have been solved and now you've got that really horrible intractable problem of getting 0.1% on your yield week in, week out and going from a prototype product to something that's really suitable for mass production and we haven't been there yet. And I think that the underlying theme is that Samsung and LG discovered that it is a difficult thing to improve. They're getting there, but they're not there yet and predicting how quickly you can learn and solve these problems has been very, very tough. And OLED has promised a lot and I think if it works and when the problems are solved then it will be very, very good. But as you can see from here compared to the LCDs of three, four, five years ago, don't bet against a mature technology because there's been way more possibilities unleashed from this mature technology of LCD than anybody could have imagined. How about the laser that, was it high sense showing that? Yeah. Is that going to be 4K and cheap and good or no? Is it similar to the DLP's that people had a few years ago in the US? I think there's some, it feels rather like DLP and I think the big warning for the display investors in that laser technology is that this year has seen the death of a really wonderful emissive technology which worked very well called Plasma. And the problem for Plasma was not the performance. The problem was that everybody else invested in LCD and the best technology doesn't always win. So be very careful going off and doing something completely different to everybody else. It's brave but I don't think the performance is there and with the prices coming down on all these LCDs still then they're hitting a moving target and to me at the moment it doesn't look like great performance and it would have to be very heavily discounted to the point that I wonder if there's a business case. I want Hollywood to flip a switch and release a thousand movies in 4K because they have them and they're archived. No. They all have them, right? No, they don't. They shot them in 4K but the masters were not kept after editing. They were not kept? No. Why? That was the digital stuff, right? Because of the cost of storage. Really? Yeah. So they've shot in 4K for 20 years but there are no 4K archives. They're very, very shallow. But they have 35mm films. Right, you can re-scan them. They should all be scanned in 4K. Yeah. So we have that content and they probably have done it already. Yeah, if you go back to the original film stock that it was shot in then you could do that and re-edit it and clean it up and then you could have something absolutely fantastic. Didn't they put the 4K stuff on 35mm before deleting the files because of storage or something? But the other stuff they transferred was in 1080. So there is no massive library out there of native 4K brushes and content. But it's pretty amazing at the Sony press conference when they talk about statistics of Netflix. Yeah. It's going to be streaming. 4K is just streaming, right? If you've got very, very good bandwidth and not too many people have it and your neighbour isn't streaming at the same time. And remember that Netflix is adaptive bitrate. So you can go off and say I'm going to watch this 4K movie. Well, halfway through when your children are playing Call of Duty upstairs and your other child is downloading a whole load of stuff and other things are going on then you're probably not watching 4K all the time. Very much dependent on where you live. You've got fibre to your home and you've got a nice play out server nearby there maybe but for an awful lot of people you can hit the 4K button and you'll be watching something that's very, very clean but is it 4K? I don't know. 10 megabits is a little bit sad. Netflix has said 25 megabits per second is what's required for reliable, good, clean 4K but a very, very small fraction of households are actually paying for that much bandwidth. And it's expensive, you know. In the U.S. paying for that much bandwidth could cost you $80 a month. But Roku told me there's a piece of cake. Well, it's a piece of cake to compress it but the reliability of it. It's the delivery. It's a two hour long movie, a three hour long movie and you have consistent bit rate where you're actually able to achieve that. I think they should ship out four terabyte hard drives to customers and then every three months you get a new one and you've sent it back. I think that's DaraTV's business model and Sony and Samsung that they have these trickle download things and I think it is a good solution that you trickle download put it onto a big hard disk and then play it out. And you can send it back to send you a new one with the new content. I think somebody used to do that with movies that you get through the post. Yeah, it was their flex, wasn't it?