HORIZON

The best new tech heading your way

1 C SEED M1

Around £290,000, cseed.tv

MicroLED is here, and it’s completely out-of its-gourd crazy. The C Seed M1 takes advantage of every one of the new screen tech’s core features to create a TV the likes of which we’ve never seen before and will (unless something very strange happens) never see in our own homes: this folding, expanding hideaway TV is a feat of engineering as much as it is a leap in innovation. It’s the sort of TV you build a room around – quite literally, given that it’s supposed to emerge from a mechanised hole in your floor and unfurl its 165-inch panel automatically, then tuck itself back into the floor when it’s done.

The M1 pulls off that feat by using MicroLED’s unique ability to form completely edge-to-edge screens, aligning them by way of a machined metal structural frame and ensuring the joins aren’t visible using what C Seed calls Adaptive Gap Calibration, essentially detecting any offsets and brightening the pixels on either side to compensate. Very clever.

MicroLED’s big issue is pixel density. It uses discrete LEDs to make up each pixel rather than OLED substrates or LCD panels, and while they’re pretty small, they’re not quite as micro as they could be: the resolution of the M1 tops out at 4K. That said, the huge advantages of MicroLED are all there. The blacks are fully black, there’s some serious 16 bit HDR on offer, and a claimed 1,920Hz refresh rate.

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