Huge change coming to your television thanks to AI technology
The humble television is about to undergo a massive transformation and the result will well and truly blow your mind.
We’ve all had that dream where we live in a cinema, right? Or maybe a planetarium?
Just having the biggest TV physically possible to watch the greatest high art cinema available alongside the most unhinged reality shows.
Well, while that can’t be the reality for most of us, the good news is that thanks to AI machine learning advancements, we can now at least get bigger TVs and get one step closer to the dream.
The fact that 75” TVs and bigger are already the fastest growing market segment implies that many people are already taking advantage of this, especially because the prices of large screen TVs have dropped in recent years.
But let’s dive a bit more into how and why this works.
The first thing is that the resolution of what your watching dictates how close you can sit to the TV before you start seeing the individual pixels (which looks bad).
The second thing is that there is an ideal distance to sit from your TV to get the correct field of view.
Basically, you don’t want to feel like you’re sitting in the front row of IMAX if you’re after the best viewing experience.
The distance you can sit back from your TV is determined by the size of your living room and how you like it laid out, but the definition relies on several factors.
Old content is presented in standard definition (DVD resolution), which can look grainy or pixelated when blown up to the size of a large screen TV. Most free to air TV channels are broadcast in SD.
Next was High Definition and Full High Definition (or 720p and 1080p, respectively), which is what HD channels are broadcast in. The latest standard is 4K, which is what premium content on Netflix is broadcast in. There’s also 8K, though there isn’t a lot of mainstream 8K content available yet.
The numbers roughly refer to the number of vertical pixels in an image.
To make those pictures look good on a 55” screen, you’d need to sit 6.1m away from an SD picture, or roughly 1m away from a 4K picture.
So, it used to be hard to justify the purchase of a 75” TV if you’re just watching free to air sports and you’re not paying for the premium Netflix tier.
Enter AI upscaling: Here to make your old content look better.
You know how in all the old crime shows people would tell the computer to “enhance” the image, and viewers who knew computers would laugh at them because that was impossible? It’s possible now. Not in a way that gives you an image accurate enough to convict someone over, but in a way that makes the pictures prettier, and more watchable on a larger scale.
Simon Howe, Director of Audio Visual at Samsung Australia told News.com.au “We launched AI upscaling in last year’s range using neural networks which had the capability to analyse what’s on your screen and recreate the areas that need to be recreated in order to upscale that as close to 4K or 8K as possible.
“This year, we’ve really enhanced that and taken it to another level, by introducing the NQ8 Gen 3 processor, which allows us to have 50 per cent more neural networks.
“So, that gives us the ability to be able to analyse 50 per cent more of what’s happening on the screen.”
When upscaling content that’s in 4K, it sharpens and enhances, almost imperceptibly to make the picture clearer. However, when upscaling from SD to 8K, that’s when the processor needs to do more heavy lifting to add details.
In Samsung’s case, the TV uses generative AI upscaling, so if there’s a fuzzy tree in the background of a TV show from 1995, the processor will look at its database of trees to then say “trees generally look like this, I can see that there’s a tree there, there’s are the details that normally exist on trees” and then fill in those details.
This does raise debates on artistic intentions, and whether this goes against that. This technology is similar to what’s being used to upscale some old movies for 4K Blu-Ray releases, and it’s something some fans will welcome for most things, and others will switch to Filmmaker Mode (which strips away the processing) for films where they want the original experience.
For example, purists will want to enjoy every detail of Casablanca exactly as Michael Curtiz intended, while people rewatching 2000s teen drama Gilmore Girls for the 20th time might just want it to look as good as possible on their 8K TV.
While AI upscaling does have some generative properties, it isn’t like MidJourney or ChatGPT, which create new images based on the stolen work of artists.
Samsung was quick to reassure us that the AI models were trained on images licensed in house, and also that it’s not making anything completely new. According to Howe “it uses a combination of deep learning and machine learning.
“So, it’s all happening on board inside the TV with the processor, and it has a reference database of existing images. It uses that, but it’ll still look at the image you’re watching and go ‘okay, those are the shades that I need to work on,’ and then recreate those shades.
“It still looks authentic, you won’t see anything that looks out of place or artificial.”
LG’s AI upscaling approach is similar to Samsung’s, but doesn’t use the words “generative AI”, preferring to liken it more to machine learning. Tony Bown, Head of Home entertainment Marketing at LG Electronics Australia told news.com.au “Before now, the TVs have had to say; ‘there’s a face on the screen, there’s a text on the screen, and there’s something moving on the screen. I need to compromise and standardise the picture.’
“Whereas now, with the power of the processors and the amount of data, that they’re referencing, they can say; ‘okay, faces should look like this, fast motion should look like this, and text should look like something else.’ So, we’re able to enhance individual parts of a picture rather than in the old standard of upscaling.”
Last year AI upscaling was reserved as a premium offering only available in the top of the range TVs, given the amount of processing power required, to now coming down to the mid range. So, in the Samsung range the 75” NeoQLED QN70F costs $3499, while the base 75” LG model with AI upscaling is the QNED86A for $2999.
While this new type of AI upscaling is only around two years old, it’s showing promising results, bringing the dream of being able to replace entire walls with just giant TVs one step closer to a feasible reality.
Alice Clarke is an award-winning freelance journalist with almost 20 years experience writing about technology. You can find her at @alicedkc.bsky.social
Originally published as Huge change coming to your television thanks to AI technology
