AI is revolutionizing every aspect of consumer technology, from your laptop’s web browser to smartphones and smart speakers. Such advances have received a lot of attention, but AI is also silently working under the hood of the greatest TVs, where it can considerably improve the overall picture quality.
At the recent CES 2024, TV manufacturers ranging from Samsung from LG to TCL and Hisense emphasized the AI capabilities of the processors powering their televisions. Such capabilities aid in activities as simple as noise reduction to more complicated ones like recognizing and separating objects of interest in photographs and then dynamically increasing contrast and color for enhanced visual impact.
AI is also used in TVs to enhance HDR tone mapping in movies and shows with high dynamic range, as well as to “re-master” older content that was not originally produced in HDR format. It is often used to improve image detail and sharpness, mostly by accessing a database of pre-existing images and using it as a foundation for subsequent processing.
New AI horizons
In 2024, AI will propel television technology to new heights, probably for the better. LG has revealed a function for its best OLED TVs called AI Director Processing, which can assess a director’s intended color scheme for each shot in a film and “enhance the color expression” accordingly. That appears to be a daring AI move by LG, and we’ll be closely monitoring this new feature to see how well it works until we get our hands on the company’s 2024 models.
Samsung, a corporation that never shies away from adopting AI, has revealed a new feature dubbed AI Motion Enhancer Pro for its 2024 8K televisions. This employs artificial intelligence to determine the sort of ball used in various sports and effectively replace it onscreen on a frame-by-frame basis, not just reducing but completely eliminating motion blur. I saw a demo of this technology in action, and the visual contrast between a ball in motion onscreen with AI Motion Enhancer Pro enabled and a ball with the function turned off was night and day.
AI and 8K TVs: Rounding out the picture
Samsung is using AI-based processing on its 8K TVs to improve the overall picture, not just the balls. The company’s 2024 8K TVs have a new CPU, the NQ8 AI Gen 3. According to Samsung, this includes an on-device AI engine (Neural Processing Unit) that is twice as fast and has eight times as many neural networks as the one used in last year’s 8K televisions.
Having so much computing capability onboard mostly aids picture upscaling. A 4K TV has 8.3 million pixels on its screen, but an 8K TV has 33 million pixels. Given that the majority of content watched on 8K TVs is in 4K or ordinary HD quality, millions of new pixels are created to fill the ultra high-definition display. The 8K AI Upscaling Pro feature in Samsung’s 8K TVs, like the image processing on 4K TVs, creates pixels by referencing a visual database, and it also uses “Quantum Super Resolution” to process images on a frame-by-frame basis to ensure lines look smooth and fine details do not appear overly enhanced.
AI and 4K TVs: now more important than ever
A significant advantage of the finest streaming services is that many now offer movies and shows in 4K resolution with Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos audio. As long as your home has a high-speed internet connection and reliable Wi-Fi, you could experience stunning 4K visual quality and immersive sound.
That benefit is now elusive. Major streaming services such as Netflix and Max have recently introduced pricing levels that require you to pay more for 4K/HDR video and Dolby Atmos audio. For some 4K TV owners, the shift has rendered those services too expensive, prompting them to downgrade to a less expensive Standard plan with HD-resolution programming or even a basic ad-supported tier.
Unless you intend to stop streaming totally and instead purchase one of the finest 4K Blu-ray players, this new development has made 4K TVs’ upscaling capabilities more vital than ever.
TV brands who use AI for upscaling have an obvious edge here because the same techniques used to make 8K images appear excellent also work for HD-to-4K conversion. However, not all TVs support technically competent 4K upscaling, even if their processors apply AI for other sorts of image enhancement.
The general processors included in many smart TVs are now better than ever, with AI-powered features like real-time scene and object identification, detail optimization, and other visual enhancements. That’s one of the main reasons why today’s low-cost big-screen TVs look far superior to versions from a few years ago. However, generic solutions cannot handle everything, and this truth will become more evident as we progressively transition to 8K resolution and considerably larger screen sizes (hello, 98-inch TVs).
When it comes to televisions, there is nothing to fear from artificial intelligence. In terms of image quality, more AI is better. However, not every artificial intelligence employed in televisions is equal. As TVs evolve from flat panels on stands to room-filling video walls, bespoke AI-based picture processing and upscaling will give obvious and indisputable visual enhancement.
