Samsung Taking Pre-Orders for 105-Inch Ultra HD TV With 90-Day Lead Time

Samsung officially entered 100-plus screen size territory Tuesday when it said it was taking pre-orders for the 105-inch UN10559W Ultra HD LED-backlit LCD TV. The company announced the jumbo TV at CES and showed it as a prototype at its 2014 TV product launch last spring (CED March 21 p1) without giving marketing details. Tuesday, the company disclosed the staggering $119,999 price tag and said it would be “built to order."

Samsung will offer customers of the 105-inch model Samsung Elite Service through which they can receive an in-home visit by Samsung field engineers who will explain the TV’s features and “optimize it for their viewing environment,” the company said. Robert Zohn, owner of Value Electronics, Scarsdale, New York, told us the TV will be fully built and assembled in Korea and then shipped to customers’ homes. Order to installation is likely a 90-day process, he said. Zohn and his team will meet the Samsung engineers and install the TV after Samsung engineers have tested it to ensure it meet standards, Zohn said.

Dealer price for the UN10559W is about $90,000, said Zohn, who will throw in installation for free “because there’s plenty of margin.” Value Electronics, which serves a wealthy Westchester County, New York, clientele, will likely sell one to three units, Zohn said, conceding it won’t be a “volume play.” When the TV is “obsolete” in three years, Zohn hopes to put the floor model in his own home as part of his rotating home showroom, but he'll have to remove the large bay window to do it, he said. While TVs of that size don’t slip easily through a standard front door, there are ways to get around the size issue, he said. It’s not uncommon, he noted, for his wealthy Manhattan customers to use a crane to move in super-large TVs or pianos. The TV weighs 199 pounds, Zohn said, and Samsung has given special parameters for installation. Minimum mounting requirements for the 105-incher are four beams with 5 quarter plywood backing, he said.

The UN10559W has a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, offering resolution of 5120 x 2160 pixels. That makes for a relatively short 42-1/2-inch height that can remove some of the front-door concerns as long as there’s enough wiggle room to handle the angles inside the home, Zohn said. The 2.35:1 aspect ratio allows videophile movie buffs, the target audience for the TV, to view movies in the natural CinemaScope format on Blu-ray, Zohn said. But while home theater masking systems can adjust for different aspect ratios with a projector, when owners of the 5120 x 2160 Samsung TV watch standard 16:9 content, they'll get “black bars on the left and right to square the image up to be 16:9,” Zohn said. On how that will sit with customers spending $120,000 for a TV, Zohn said, “I don’t think that’s a fun thing to do.” A 110-inch model from Samsung in the 16:9 format “that’s moments behind this one” will give buyers a choice, he said.

There have been proposals raised before the ATSC on the next-gen ATSC 3.0 system for a “5K” solution packing 2160 x 4800 resolution and a 64:27 aspect ratio (CED May 9 p2). There’s no 5K component in CEA-861-F, the version of the spec that was released last year, said Brian Markwalter, CEA senior vice president-standards and research. CEA-861-F does contain “some 64:27 aspect ratios for HD resolutions,” Markwalter said, and 5K “is in the queue for a possible extension.” The “specific proposal” before CEA is for 5120 x 2160 at p24/25/30 frame rates, Markwalter said. Samsung said its 105-inch set is compatible with the company’s future-proofing Evolution kit, which would make it capable of HDMI 2.0’s current frame rates of 60p, extendable to higher frame rates in the future.

Zohn called the UN10559W’s picture “spectacular” due to the “enormous amount of LED lamps directly behind the panel,” rather than an edge-lit design. “Not only is it a full-array, local dimmed,” he said, “it has a large amount of local dimming zone and a very high volume of LED lamps, giving it very precise black level control,” he said. “It’s very costly to build a display like that,” he said. He said LEDs are graded by color and contrast ratio and it’s a challenge to get a high volume of LEDs to match each other. “They go through a huge volume of these to get them consistent in one television,” he said. “This is a really special TV for the ultra-wealthy."

We asked Zohn what kind of customer pushback there could be from an early adopter who plunks down $110,000 for the latest and greatest TV, only to have that model bettered by the next big thing three years down the road. Zohn welcomed the question, which allowed him to give the Samsung spiel about the upgrade process through the company’s One Connect media box ($299) that steps up the processing power and other features of a TV to keep it up to date. Dealers are just about to receive the 2014 One Connect box that will bring Samsung’s 85-inch 4K TV up to HDMI 2.0 and HEVC -- “everything you'd want that’s coming out now,” Zohn noted.

But it’s still unclear how comprehensive the upgrades will be via the One Connect box, Zohn said. He cited the expressed desire from video experts for a “bigger color space” with 4K TVs that could be enabled by Rec. 2020 as well as high dynamic range. “My question to manufacturers,” Zohn said, “is that it’s nice to have these evolution kits, but that’s all about processing.” What isn’t clear is whether current Ultra HD panels are capable of high dynamic range or a wider colorimetry, and with HDR and wide color gamut standard lacking, that’s a moot point for now. “I think in many cases we're going to need 10-bit panels, not 8-bit panels and the answer is no,” Zohn said. The question about future proofing, Zohn said, “is still really a gray area.”

Other dealers were less sanguine. David Berman, vice president-sales and operations at Stereo East, Frisco, Texas, cited other manufacturers’ attempts for bragging rights with 100-inch-plus TVs, which in reality brought in only a trickle of actual sales. He sees Samsung’s intro as an effort to “continue the trend of being perceived as being on the leading edge of technology in every aspect of what they do.” He called the 105-inch “a statement piece” that “five or 10 people” -- may buy. “They'll play with it because no one has convinced them that a 4K projector is a better choice,” Berman said. The projector would also allow customers to change the aspect ratio, he noted. A customer could get a 138-inch screen for $5,000-$6,000 and pair it with a $28,000 projector, “and you've got a video combination that would kill everything,” he said.

Manufacturers continue to push larger, higher-margin screen sizes as a way to stay above the competitive bloodbath that flat-panel TVs are taking in the 50-inch and under segment in the U.S. But how large TVs can go for the home market remains to be seen.

Sharp trotted out a 108-inch model in 2008 (CED Dec 5 p1) for $150,000, some $25,000 higher than the company initially wanted to go due to high manufacturing costs. The 108-inch size is sold only through Sharp’s commercial group now. Prior to Sharp’s arrival with the 108-inch, Panasonic reigned as big-screen leader with a 103-inch plasma TV sold through its commercial unit. The Panasonic website still shows a picture of the TH-103VX200U from the company’s commercial division, although it’s not clear whether any remain in stock. The company sold out of all of its plasma TVs soon after it exited the consumer plasma segment at the end of 2013, a spokesman told us.

LG announced a 105-inch curved LED-lit LCD model in a pre-CES spoiler in December, but the 105UC9 doesn’t come up in a Google shopping search. At the time, LG said the LED-lit model would retail for $69,999, far beneath the Samsung’s price for the UN10559W. But the model hasn’t shipped in the U.S. John Taylor, vice president-public affairs and communications for LG, told us, “The 105-inch 21:9 LED ‘5K’ TV that LG demonstrated to much acclaim at CES is still on track for 2014 release.” Details will follow “in the near future,” he said.

For dealers who cater to customers who have the space to accommodate a mammoth TV, even 90 inches is pushing it for installation, some have told us. The Sound Room in St. Louis sold “a few” of Sharp’s high-end 90-inch models when they first hit the market two years ago, said Sound Room President David Young. “But then the bloom came off the rose and then we didn’t sell one for quite a while,” he told us. When the store finally sold its remaining 90-inch, the display model that greeted customers as they walked into the store, “we replaced it with a 65-inch 4K” model, Young said. Young’s reaction to a 105-inch: “If they get any bigger they're going to have to figure out a way to fold ‘em because you won’t be able to get them into somebody’s house.”