FEATURE INTERVIEW KEVIN
FEATURE INTERVIEW KEVIN LEE VICE PRESIDENT VISUAL DISPLAY DIVISION DIGITAL MEDIA BUSINESS SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD Mr. Kevin Lee is Vice President of the Digital TV Market Intelligence group of Samsung Electronics. Mr. Lee joined Samsung as a member of the Monitor R & D department in 1987. He started working in TV sales and marketing in 2005 as a general manager for the TV product planning team. Recently, he was a major influence in the launch of the world’s best selling LCD products, R7 and R8, the award winning ‘Bordeaux’ series. What do you think are the biggest groundswell trends in the LCD TV industry? First of all, the flat panel TV market, including LCD and plasma, is growing fast based on digital broadcasting. Customers want to see moving images close to reality at the highest possible quality. Flat panel TV -- LCD or plasma -- can provide this solution which is why the demand is growing. Your role covers visual display, and TV is no longer just a TV but more of a visual display because the content choices for it are getting more varied. How do you see the use of visual display growing over time? I think it depends on the content and how much content we can support through the flat panel TV. For example, in the past, the customer watched only television programmes on the TV. The next step was using VCR or DVD, which allowed watching movies. Now, with IT technology and the Internet interface, customers can get a lot of different types of content. However, until recently, those could only be watched through the PC. Now with the improvements in the Internet infrastructure, such as broadband and compression technologies, the customer can get high quality content through the PC and at this moment, customers would like to watch this content on a large TV. So convergence is the “Leitmotiv” in TV development in 2008… Yes, in the future Internet and TV are going to merge. For the time being, TV models can support some multimedia features. In our case, we call it the Wiselink Pro. We can also support moving picture content through the USB interface. Normally, a DivX player is needed, but through our new model, the customer does not need a separate DivX player, simply a USB key. Do you think USB is a trend, which is why you are using it? Actually, there are so many kinds of memory cards. So we thought that USB can be the standard for the customer. If they have several kinds of memory cards, they can use a memory card interface through the USB. And also, USB is plug and play. It’s very simple to use, which is why we used it for multimedia features. It’s the first step. And then we are thinking about interconnectivity and through the Internet we can support many kinds of content. So what about Internet direct through TV? This year we launched a new TV model called the 750 model in Korea. This is a normal TV, but we have added an interface, which uses the widget interface system. You can select any kind of content and you can also connect to YouTube with it. It should be coming out in the USA and Europe next year. So now, without any computer, the customer can enjoy content from the Internet. Samsung is differentiating this year through its design concept. Can you tell me about that? From 2004, we concentrated on design differentiation. We then launched a new mechanical technology based on our new design, which was a high gloss design, in a pentagon shape. This was new for us as the price remained affordable but at the same time we had design differentiation. This was successful until 2007, but then we started to find products in the market that were similar to ours in terms of design, so that is why we saw the need to adopt a new design concept to differentiate ourselves. So we developed a new concept called “touchable colour”. In the European market, we are calling it “crystal design” which you can see in the transparent part of the TV with the black border and the wine red colour. We achieve this design through the double injection technology. There is no spray or colour addition process. What material is that? Normal resin. We are using two different colours of resin to achieve this effect, transparent and dark red. We could not do this with previous technology, only with this new technology. Furthermore, this new technology allows for ecofriendly manufacturing. For Europe, the production is done in Slovakia and Hungary. Talking about picture quality, what differentiates Samsung? 16 www.ifa-international.org IFA International • Monday, 25 th August 2008
FEATURE INTERVIEW Our goal for picture quality is to make black as black as possible. The second goal is how to make the images as bright as possible. This allows us to have a very high contrast ratio. The third one is how to feel the natural colour. So black, white and colour are our goal for image quality. Based on our long-term experience in the TV business, our engineers made our own chipset solution with our own semiconductor division. In that chip, we applied our own image quality algorithm. It has a wide colour enhancer and a high contrast ratio technology. And also, we applied our Internet TV algorithm in the same chip. As you can see, the LCD panel is very black when the TV is turned off. This is thanks to a super clear treatment on the LCD panel surface. To get something with high black levels, you could also use LED backlights with alternate lighting. Is this going to become the norm? Actually, we applied the LED backlight technology to our premium line. But we are making a reasonable price for LED backlit TVs and next year we will further expand this. Does Samsung produce LEDs? Yes, our sister company makes the LED devices. We got the EISA award based on the LED backlit LCD TV. What about other technologies such as OLED? Obviously with active-matrix OLED you can use the same factories as LCD so that will be interesting… I think the next generation of flat panel might be OLED, because they have a lot of advantages and strong points against LCD or plasma. For example, we can make them very thin and the image quality is better than LCD or plasma. At this moment there are still some limitations in to make the real product. Currently, from the technology point of view it is feasible, but from a manufacturing point of view, there are still some limitations. Our sister company, SDI is now producing OLED displays, but only for small screen sizes, such as mobiles phones. We already displayed the new concept at the Las Vegas show and will display it during IFA. We are hoping for a European rollout next year, but my concern is the price. It is not affordable for the average customer but some customers just want the new technology – they don’t care about the price. We will also have a demo of the 30-inch OLED at our booth at IFA. IFA International • Monday, 25 th August 2008 www.ifa-international.org 17
