At last year’s CES, I drove all the way to Vegas just to see a prototype of a next-generation display called nanoLED. If you haven’t heard of it, you might have heard of the technology it’s based on: quantum dots. While the prototype was cool enough for me to drive eight hours over two days, it was still just a tiny prototype. The screen was more Nintendo Switch than home theater size.
Things have moved quickly in the last year. At CES 2024, Nanosys showed off a significantly larger prototype. Not TV sized just yet, but it’s a big step.
NanoLED, specifically electroluminescent, aka “direct-view” quantum dots, are even more advanced than current TV tech like LED, LCD or OLED. They boast improved picture quality, energy savings and manufacturing efficiency. And they’re theoretically so easy to produce, they could usher in a sci-fi world of screens on everything from eyeglasses to windscreens and windows, similar to transparent OLED and Micro-LED. Here’s what we know.
Read more: Best TVs of CES 2024
Direct-view quantum dots grow up
NanoLED has the potential to be thinner and more efficient than OLED.
Sharp is Nanosys’ manufacturing partner. While Sharp has been out of the US TV business since 2015, it didn’t abandon the TV market entirely and reacquired its brand name for use in North America in 2019. The company has a lot of firsts in the TV market, including the first LCD TV, all the way back in 1992, and it sold the first 8K TV in 2016. It’s also worth noting that it’s majority owned by a little company called Hon Hai Precision Industry Company Limited, aka Foxconn, a massive manufacturing company that makes iPhones, Kindles, PlayStations and more.
