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We chat with Magnus Nilssen, Tech Product Manager TV & AV at Samsung about some incredibly clever TVs, speakers, AI and more.
"Hi everyone, I'm Alex here with Gamereactor, I'm at CES.
We've just been checking out loads of what Samsung's got on offer.
I'm here with Magnus. Magnus, it might be like picking a favourite child, but can you tell me maybe what some of your favourite aspects are about this massive showcase that you guys have got?
Because we went through the whole halls, it's like a museum exhibition honestly."
"I wish I could have this whole thing encompassed, but it's impossible to do so.
So yeah, just, do you have a favourite?
You mean one particular favourite? I have to go for three if that's possible.
So, first of course I'm very proud of the Micro RGB that we see next to us."
"Micro RGB is a technology that we launched just at the end of last year, and now we are expanding that to a whole range of screen sizes, all the way from 55 inch all the way up to 130 inch.
We haven't made this big of a TV before."
"And this one we made in a design we call the Timeless Frame Design, and it's a homage back to the 1913, sorry, that was very far back, 2013, when we launched our first UHD 4K TV, and that was the Timeless 4K 85 inch.
Now we hit the 130 inch."
"So, you have two more, I've just cut you off, I'm so sorry.
And the next one, if I take it from how we walked, would be the Freestyle Plus.
So, an update to our very popular small compact portable personal projector.
And the Freestyle Plus is almost twice as bright as the previous version, and it also has some very clever AI controlled ways to adapt the picture to the surface where you are able to project it."
"So, it finds its space and gives you a sharp picture.
That one, and then the third one would be our new speakers.
I am very happy that we are seriously entering the wireless speaker domain, and we do that with two new speakers that support a number of different setups."
"So, you can use it together with the TV, you can use it standalone or two or four, or whatever you want to build up.
So, those were my three favorites.
Once again, I apologize for jumping in, but I wanted to jump in to talk about the Micro RGB, because it looks so spectacular."
"This camera won't do it justice, but it just looks so nice, and it's not just for the 130 inch behemoth that I see behind me.
This is something that consumers can buy, but what makes it that leap ahead compared to mini LED and the OLED TVs that people are probably looking at when they think you're buying?
Well, in a way, it's a sibling to the mini LEDs, but here we take it a few steps further, because not only do we make the light sources so much smaller, so we can control the lights with a very precise level, but we also make it color, and I think that's the biggest change."
"So, now you can adapt the backlight color to what you want to show on the screen in the first place.
So, you don't need to filter away as much color that you don't need to be rendered on the screen.
This gives us purer colors, so we can cover a larger color space than we have ever done before, and now we can cover 100% of the BT.2020 color space."
"That's like the holy grail for UHD standard.
This also gives us more brightness, and in fact, for the area, lower power consumption, because if it's supposed to show you red, we don't have to shine with the blue and the green LED, so there's less energy to filter away."
"For people like me who might not understand the technical terms, it's basically making colors and brightness pop that extra bit, correct?
Indeed. So, the wider color space gives it the ability to show natural colors closer to reality.
You mentioned before about some AI tools that are coming into not only your TVs, but also the Freestyle Plus and things like that."
"AI is always a big buzzword nowadays.
Some people are skeptical of it, some people are a bit more enjoyable of it.
Could you explain, perhaps, the ways that AI is going to be worked into Samsung TVs, and how is it going to influence the way that we watch TV as well as consume wider media?
That's a great question. I see that there are two different ways we use AI."
"One is to make it easier to get the most suitable picture and sound quality for your certain content and for your certain environment.
We use AI to analyze the image to try to understand whether it's sports, and in the most advanced versions, even what sport it is."
"If you see that it's football, we know the ball should be round, so we can make sure that the ball looks correct in each and every frame.
We are also using AI to understand what the sound is.
From the audio, we can pick out what is the speech, what is music, what is background noise."
"This year, we even made it possible to adjust those levels manually, so you can ask the TV to cut the commentator if you want to, and then just hear the game and the game noise, because we let AI analyze that.
So, AI is, in a way, used in an under-the-hood way to give you an easier performance, a better performance without you having to fiddle around with the settings."
"Same for video. If you have a bright room, you may need more contrast to still have a good picture experience, and you don't want to fiddle around with a day setting and a night setting on your remote.
At least, I couldn't convince every family member to do that."
"So, it's much better to leave AI to take care of that.
And the other part of AI is what you may think of the first when you talk about AI, that is, I ask the TV for something and it gives me something.
So, you can use... It kind of merges with voice control, where you ask the TV to increase the volume and it increases the volume, but you can also ask the TV what movies has this particular actor made, and then you can get the reply, and then you can go find that in your own streaming services."
"So, one is what you typically think of when you talk about AI, and the other one is more the performance part.
I can tell you my dad will thank you for the under the hood stuff, because he's sick of football commentary. So, thank you very much."
"Okay, no problem. I mean, sometimes you can hear that the commentator may be favoring another team than you're favoring, and then, cut him out.
Talking about... Jumping on to the speakers again, because I know that that's something that you're particularly passionate about, the audio side of things."
"How is this... Because speakers are fairly new to Samsung in terms of traditional speakers that we're thinking about, not necessarily the soundbars.
These new speakers, how do they improve upon what you guys have done before?
Because they're this almost like blend in the background design, similar to the speaker frames that you've made before, I say, but they take that extra step up in terms of audio quality and working together."
"So, basically, what's cool about these new speakers?
So, yes, but I have to say, we have been working on the sound quality for speakers for quite some time. We started and we have now a sound lab in California.
I think it was in 2015, we started that. And since then, they have done a tremendous work in making our soundbars sound better. And now I dare to say that the soundbars is not only good for action video, where there's more crash, bang and shoot, but it also works with music and voices and all that."
"So, I'm tremendously proud of the performance of soundbars.
And now we bring a lot of that knowledge also to our Wi-Fi speakers.
So, we started out a bit soft a year ago with a music frame, which is like a blend in speaker.
You don't even know it's a speaker, it just sits there and plays music in the room."
"Now, these speakers are more looking like speakers. Still, we got the help from Borolec to design it in a way that it's not only beautiful sound, but also a beautiful speaker that you want to have in your home. So, that is the part where it blends in.
Then you add the Samsung knowledge of integrating it into our system."
"So, we have a feature we call Q-Symphony, where the TV can work together with a soundbar.
And it works together in that way that when you connect the Samsung TV in a Samsung soundbar, it has to be a soundbar that supports Q-Symphony, of course.
But if you have that, then the soundbar will know, understand what TV it's connected to, and it will send the right audio to the right speaker in the TV to make sure that it uses the TV speakers to add spacious sound quality to your video playback."
"So, if you have any other soundbar or most other soundbars, you only hear the soundbar.
But here, the soundbar can make use also of the TV speakers.
Now, we have this year added the support for Q-Symphony to up to five speakers.
So, you can have the TV, and you can have two speakers next to it, or a soundbar to it, and two rear speakers, and then you're not even filled the quota yet."
"And this is because we want to be able to use four of the new loudspeakers as your surround system and use the TV as your center speaker, and it works fine.
Did you mention in there that there's the Spotify collaboration that you guys are working with on these new speakers?
So, that's a user interface benefit that we have in a collaboration with Spotify."
"So, it's called Spotify Tap.
So, instead of when you get home and you just want music, otherwise, typically you have to bring up your phone, unlock it, find the Spotify app, start playback, and select where you want to hear it from."
"Here, you just have to go to the speaker and you tap it on the top, and it will start playback of the last playlist from your Spotify.
So, if you're listening to Spotify in your car, and you go in, you just tap the speaker, you just continue.
I have to take my next question from a gaming standpoint, because we are Game Reactor after all, and we have seen some interesting monitors with the 3D aspect as well."
"It seems that you guys are pushing a lot in terms of audio and visuals into this sense of immersion, which is something that gamers are definitely going to appreciate.
Could you talk maybe about, is that your design goal and your design aspects with this new wave of stuff, and is this something we can expect to see more of?
So, I have some limitation of my knowledge about the monitors."
"So, I'm working typically with TV and audio.
I know for a fact that we are working with 3D and we are pushing the boundaries for 3D in the monitors side, and we already have one that we are selling at the moment, 27-inch, now we are launching 32-inch.
So, that is really truly immersive, because now you have 3D without glasses, and it's perfect for a single person game."
"It will follow your eyes to make sure you get the right 3D experience.
But we also see that consumers are more and more using their TV, our TVs, as a monitor for gaming.
And I'd say there are two kinds of gamers, one who is playing for fun and one who is playing to win, right?
It might be that I'm playing for fun, you might be playing for win."
"So, I just want convenience, but want to play for fun.
And we do support cloud gaming in our smart hub, so you can find several different cloud gaming services, where you just need a controller connected to the TV and you can go play.
So, that's lowering the threshold for consumers to get into the gaming business."
"Then what we do for the more serious gamer, we have now introduced the support for G-Sync in our OLED lineup.
So, we have both, we have since a long time support for FreeSync, FreeSync Premium and FreeSync Premium Pro, and now we also add G-Sync support.
We will also this year up the frequency, so the refresh rate in many TVs."
"So, that will also be a support for the gamer.
I may have missed out on the question a bit, but for the rest, when talking about immersion in gaming, I was also thinking about, we use AI also for the gaming part.
So, with AI, we can identify what game you are playing and we can adjust the settings to suit that particular type of gaming."
"It will recognize the game title and know whether it should prioritize speed or performance, sort of a picture-in-picture experience.
Magnus, that's all I've got for you. Thank you so much for your time."
