Samsung focuses on digital features to differentiate its tellies

Samsung has unveiled its 2022 range of TVs ahead of CES, loaded with an array of smart technologies that provide NFT trading and onboard cloud gaming.

Samsung boasts that the new Micro LED, Neo QLED and ‘Lifestyle’ TVs have ‘next generation’ picture quality.  The latest incremental hardware upgrades have been thrown into the stew in order to achieve this – 20-bit greyscale depth, advanced contrast mapping, over 1 million steps of brightness and colour levels, and a 99.99% screen-to-body ratio, to name a few.

As is often the trend for TV showcases at CES, there’s nothing really mould shattering hardware wise here. All this internal gadgetry combines to a create a great looking picture we’re sure, especially when they pipe in those mega high-res reels of brightly coloured parrots or waterfalls.

The interesting bit is the ‘Smart Hub’ software that will be loaded with them, which is subdivided into a few areas of function.

Gaming Hub provides a cloud gaming service direct to the TVs thanks to partnerships with GeForce Now, Google Stradia and Utomik. Gamers can browse, purchase and instantly play games, with the processing grunt work being done remotely.

Watch Together allows you to video chat with other people whilst watching the same thing, and Smart Calibration is a tool to intelligentially get all the image settings on your telly just so.

More leftfield is The NFT Platform, which is described as an ‘integrated platform for discovering, purchasing and trading digital artwork through Micro LED, Neo QLED and The Frame.’

Smart TVs are not new but these features are representative of some of the more recent trends and potentially substantial advancements in a product area that not too long ago wasn’t much more than access to a clunky web browser very few people used more than once.

How much these new features will resonate with the general public will vary. You could perhaps be sceptical as the likelihood that the culture en-mass will start routinely transmitting footage of themselves sprawled on the couch as they watch the next episode of Succession. On the other hand, it’s not clear why you’d ever need a games console again for use with any TV loaded with something like Gaming Hub.

For those involved in CES, non-fungible token integration is definitely one of the more attention grabbing angles to take when trying to pitch a new line of TVs. The service appears to provide the ability to purchase, trade and display NFTs, but there’s not much more info than that at the moment.

NFTs are something of a buzzword at the moment and while their implications on digital economies and associations with blockchain financial decentralisation movements are definitely interesting, it’s all likely to remain a bit nebulous to the mainstream.

How much of an impact something like this could ever have on sales of a mass market product like a television remains to be seen. The industry couldn’t convince the world to put on a pair of 3D specs, so it could certainly be argued something as niche/fringe/techy as NFTs are unlikely to provide much of an incentive to the average Joe wandering into Curry’s in a year’s time looking for a new box.

But grandstanding new TVs is all about proving you’ve got the bleeding edge kit, and indeed that’s what CES is all about as well, so it’s easy to see why Samsung decided this was a good idea.