How Xiaomi transparent TV born?
Xiaomi Master OLED Transparent TV was released on August 11, using a 55-inch OLED screen, support 120Hz refresh rate, priced at 49,999 yuan. Today, Xiaomi’s official article on this transparent TV’s technical ideas and principles of science and technology combing.
Xiaomi transparent TV surprised the audience, and the discussion about this transparent TV peaked after the conference. How has Xiaomi transparent TV born? This article will provide a complete and in-depth scientific overview of the technical ideas and principles.
Take out all that is not essential; What’s left must be transparent.
The TV shape is very fixed, like a “black box”, there are many parts inside the obstacle transparent, so the idea of making the TV transparent is simply “take away all the non-essential, leaving behind must be transparent”, this idea throughout the entire Xiaomi transparent TV birth process.
The first one is the back panel of the TV, which is almost always black and contains various components such as the T-CON board, power supply board, motherboard, etc. These are all non-essential items that prevent the TV from becoming transparent, so they need to be removed.
But “remove” is not the same as “throwaway”, these components need to be removed from the backplane and re-integrated to form an external host, and then through the cable to establish contact with the screen, so that it works properly.
Such a solution was partially used in Xiaomi’s wall-mounted TV, which removed the heavy and redundant “burden” from the TV backplane and placed the original host on the backplane externally, thus realizing the extreme thinness of the screen, and the external host solution provided the prerequisite for the TV to be transparent.
Xiaomi’s transparent TV host and screen to do a separate program similar to this, but more complex.
After the elimination of redundant physical components, you can now focus on the screen itself, the current TV widely used screen display scheme has LCD (liquid crystal) and OLED two kinds both can be transparent, but OLED because of the self-lighting properties, has the inherent advantage of transparent TV.
Because LCD needs backlight to display the image, which also decided that even if made transparent LCD TV will also appear as a box image, which is contrary to the aesthetic pursuit of modern TV thin and light, besides, due to the existence of polarizer, its transparency can not be higher, so whether from the appearance or display effect, LCD (liquid crystal) transparent program can only be PASS off.
2 million transparent sub-pixels; Blinds such as the “magic” OLED screen
How to make the OLED screen to achieve transparent display, here the introduction of common life “blinds” to facilitate your understanding.
A picture with a pattern of the shutters, if the blades are completely closed, you can see the complete picture, but at the same time behind the scenery is also completely closed by the shutters blocked.
But if you unscrew the blinds at an angle, you’ll find that although the image on the blades is cut, it doesn’t affect the overall view, and you can still clearly identify the patterned content on the blinds. Moreover, the unscrewed blinds allow the outdoor scenery to come through, the picture and landscape to achieve coexistence. And this is nearly the same principle as the Xiaomi Transparent TV.
In this analogy, the blinds and windows form a whole transparent screen, the display area is the “blade” of the blinds, the transparent area is unscrewed “gap between the blades”, although the transparent area can not display images, but if you put “When the gap between the blades” is properly controlled and small enough that the human eye cannot even detect it, the display area composed of the various blades can display a clear and complete pattern, and the “gap between the blades” also reveals the scenery behind it, achieving a magical visual effect of transparency.
After understanding the principle of “blinds”, let’s review the principle from the microscopic point of view, as we can see from the following figure, in addition to the 4 sub-pixels of WRGB in conventional OLED screen, nearly 50% of the area of transparent OLED pixels are added.Sub-pixels”, “transparent sub-pixels + WRGB sub-pixels” make up the individual pixels of a transparent OLED screen, so that there are 1920×1080 = 2,073,600 pixels on this 55-inch transparent screen.
In summary, there are enough WRGB sub-pixels to form the “blades” in the blinds theory, which are responsible for displaying the image, and enough transparent sub-pixels to form the “gaps between the blades” in the blinds theory, which are responsible for transparency.
Because nearly half of the total number of pixels are completely transparent, the transparent area is large enough and evenly distributed, so it achieves a high level of transparency from the visual effect, while the other half of the display area composed of WRGB also has more than half of the number of pixels to display the image, so the display level is also high.
All of the above, the whole OLED screen has become a piece of “glass” with high transparency, forming the most important part of the whole transparent TV, and because of the high resolution and OLED self-illumination advantages, it also maintains a very high display level.
The principle is there: It’s only a small step away from mass production
Based on the above realization of the OLED screen transparency, so in theory, it is possible to create a transparent TV concept machine, but Xiaomi wants to do something even crazier to mass-produce this extremely futuristic product.
A TV to mass production, need to go through a series of testing and certification, which is tantamount to the difficulty of creating a concept machine on the weighted index.
How do you bring a piece of “transparent glass” to life? It is necessary to test the OBM ability of manufacturers, OBM is called OLED Basic Module, which means that TV manufacturers independently complete the whole process of OLED module R&D design, system testing, and manufacturing, which is the “ticket” to judge whether an enterprise can develop OLED independently. In the TV field, Xiaomi is the only one in China.
OBM contains several aspects, such as the surface of the screen tempering treatment, Xiaomi transparent TV to take the physical tempering, that is, a whole piece of tempered glass and the screen to fit, to improve the screen pressure resistance, but also to eliminate the potential shattering screen security risks; in addition to the use of screen adhesive, Xiaomi TV uses UV adhesive for bonding, making the screen thickness further reduced, but also improve the bonding accuracy, the screen. The overall viewing experience is further improved.
The external host, as mentioned above, is different from ordinary split TVs, and to ensure the overall perception, the Xiaomi Transparent TV creatively made the host and the screen as one, and passed extremely high structural strength tests.
For the most part, Xiaomi engineers also did challenging technical research on heat dissipation and EMI.
As the host of Xiaomi’s transparent OLED TV is designed to be stacked on top of each other, so the power supply as a “big fan of heat” is directly baking the motherboard, to distribute this part of the heat, Xiaomi engineers have made a lot of efforts.
Many tiny cooling holes are designed around the mainframe, and through the delicate layout and special design of the internal cooling system, every inch of internal space is maximally utilized, allowing even convection of heat inside and outside the mainframe to overcome the problem of heat dissipation in a small space.
Besides, the motherboard chip on the heat sink is also specially designed a step to extend and bridge to the shell beam, so that you can cleverly use the shell to help the motherboard heat dissipation; in addition to the selection of components are also taken to high-temperature components, to further ensure the efficient and stable operation of the motherboard.
Xiaomi transparent TV’s transparent glass and ultra-narrow metal frame combined with the structure of the screen, signal lines through the metal closed base structure, the internal tightly stacked structure will have its own special EMI (that is, the work of electronic products will cause interference to the surrounding other electronic products) potential problems, Xiaomi transparent TV in the early design stage will take appropriate measures to target solutions, later test mass production stage experiments, to prove that these the initiative has effectively curbed the radiation spillover from the vast majority of the product’s structure.
The mass production of Xiaomi’s transparent TV seems to be an impossible task, but based on years of accumulation in TV technology, Xiaomi will finally present such a magical product in front of the world, Xiaomi has also become “the world’s first mass production of transparent OLED TV manufacturers”.
