From rollable TVs to those that double as artwork on walls, TV manufacturers have reached far into their bags of tricks over the years to impress consumers.
But this year, Samsung is betting on a unique concept specifically designed with smartphone users in mind.
Samsung showed off its new Sero TV at the CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas on Sunday. It features a display that can rotate either horizontally or vertically.
Samsung hopes the product will appeal to Millennials who mostly watch or shoot vertical videos on their phones and who might want to watch those videos on a much bigger screen. (“Sero” means vertical in Korean).
The 43-inch 4K television looks like a standard horizontal model. But when you press a button, the orientation of the display switches, similar to what happens on a mobile device.
It’s like that scene in “Demolition Man,” the 1993 film starring Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock: video screens hang on the wall vertically in the movie’s utopian future, set in 2032.
Samsung Galaxy users can sync the TV to automatically rotate and match the orientation in real time. But it’s possible to mirror what’s on other devices, including the iPhone.
The company also showed off a new 8K TV with a nearly bezel-less Infinity Screen and deep-learning AI, which does things like analyze the brightness of the room and the scene you’re watching to maintain contrast.
An 8K TV quadruples the number of pixels, just as 4K did with 1080p. But with limited 8K content available, it will likely remain a niche product for now.
