11mo ago

Edge-Lit, Thin LCD TVs Are Having Early Heat Death Issues

hackaday.com

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As for why EL LCDs still exist since they seem to require extreme heatsinking to keep the LEDs from melting straight through the LCD? RTINGS figures it’s because EL allows for LCD TVs to be thinner, allowing them to compete with OLEDs while selling at a premium compared to even FALD LCDs.
People need to stop buying the thinnest thing.
- So what even is the point of the "thinnest" tv?
  Is that 1/8th of an inch somehow going to REALLY make your TV not fit on the mount over your fireplace or something?
  
  Consumerism requires that consumers be obsessed with the quest for the best.
  They achieve that by making you dissatisfied with your current whatever. Your car doesn't have the latest and greatest entertainment system. It's five horsepower slower than the new model, due to its age it has maintenance requirements.
  Your computer maxes out at 64 gigs of RAM. Your SSD is only 1 TB of storage and only works at 5,000 megabits per second where state of the art is 7,700.
  The new game that you like will only get 60 frames per second when you're playing it. Better slap in a new $1,000 GPU or better yet buy a new $3,500 computer.
  The girl you're seeing only has b cup titties, better talk her into getting a boob job. Get lipo. Go pay some surgeon $10,000 to make your dick a quarter of an inch bigger. Go buy a new house and new clothes, go on that big vacation and make sure you put it on Instagram so everyone knows how good you've got it.
  As long as you are not content with your current lot, consumerism has achieved its goal.
  
  There is really no need to make them that thin. TVs used to be a couple feet thick and wall mounting a TV meant cutting a big hole in the wall. 2 or 3 inches thick is nothing.
  
  You do not mount a tv over a fireplace. The heat from it will warp the tv.
  
  Thin things look nice in industrial design. It's why phones stopped being chunky as soon as the battery packs could be scaled down. It's why EV cars are in higher demand than EV trucks/UVs. Watches became a prestige product when they were thin enough to wear on a wrist instead of fitting in a pocket. Flashlights became a collectors hobby after they shrank down to be palm sized while retaining their brightness. Cameras became ubiquitous once they stopped needing a tripod and flash powder. Smaller things, thinner things, are more attractive to consumers.
- People need to stop buying the thinnest thing
  Yeah, I think one of the problems is that thin is a familiar and commonly reported spec for a display. If MTTF were reported --- and it should be! --- then I think the problem would sort itself out.
- Do people buy the thinnest thing? Laptops or phones maybe to some extent, but TVs I sincerely doubt.
  And having gotten to interact with the real process of product development, I gotta say in my (relatively narrow) experience it's based a lot more on vibes/politics than market research or focus groups.
  I can totally see "make it as thin as XYZ" being a hard requirement for no better reason than a PM felt strongly about it, and no-one had all three infinity stones necessary to call them out (engineering knowledge, understanding of the PD pipeline, and political capital).
  
  Do people buy the thinnest thing? Laptops or phones maybe to some extent, but TVs I sincerely doubt.
  Some people like the glamour of super thin TVs, they're a bit like fancy sculptures.... But I'd wager most people just get the cheapest TV at their preferred size, with some accommodation for perceived quality or features.
  
  I have a 2018 OLED, and the ratio of comments by guests about thinness vs picture quality is 3:1.
- Then ruins oleds too. Oled need giant heat sinks to work properly, but they've been being very thin and having plastic bags so they can look sleek. It's especially obnoxious because full array LCDs and uniform thickness OLED are much thinner than the protruding bulge that comes out on most super thin TVs.
- Meh, if you want a thin TV, just get an OLED, it's what that technology was designed for.
- That's what she said.
I've never really been a fan of thin technology like this. Even laptops, the hardware needs room to breath. I'd rather have a thicker TV so it can breath. Just like the firetv sticks, those things really heat up.
- It's the only way to stand out in the store.
Don't run them at full brightness and you should be ok.
- Also it's edge lit. Just get a full array local dinning version
Wow. The "designed to fail" backdrop on the video says a lot about this. They're aiming for clicks, rather than rigorous testing.
I'm not at all surprised that TVs aren't designed to be used 24/7 by residential users. And I'm not at all surprised that running them for 10,000 hours straight causes a lot of problems for them.
And I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that overworking them in the short term like that isn't the same as using them regularly and normally for 6 years. Some of those things might still happen, but some of it is death from overheating.

30 comments