Enlarge / A promotional image for Amazon's 4-Series Fire TVs. (credit: Amazon)

A lawsuit is seeking to penalize Amazon for allegedly providing "fake list prices and purported discounts" to mislead people into buying Fire TVs.

As reported by Seattle news organization KIRO 7, a lawsuit seeking class-action certification and filed in US District Court for the Western District of Washington on September 12 [PDF] claims that Amazon has been listing Fire TV and Fire TV bundles with "List Prices" that are higher than what the TVs have recently sold for, thus creating "misleading representation that customers are getting a 'Limited time deal.'" The lawsuit accuses Amazon of violating Washington's Consumer Protection Act.

The plaintiff, David Ramirez, reportedly bought a 50-inch 4-Series Fire TV in February for $299.99. The lawsuit claims the price was listed as 33 percent off and a "Limited time deal" and that Amazon "advertised a List Price of $449.99, with the $449.99 in strikethrough text.” As of this writing, the 50-inch 4-Series 4K TV on Amazon is marked as having a "Limited time deal" of $299.98.

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Scottish inventor John Logie Baird had a lot of ingenious ideas, not all of which caught on. His phonovision was an early attempt at video recording, with the signals preserved on phonograph records. His noctovision used infrared light to see objects in the dark, which some experts claim was a precursor to radar.

But Baird earned his spot in history with the televisor. On 26 January 1926, select members of the Royal Institution gathered at Baird’s lab in London’s Soho neighborhood to witness the broadcast of a small but clearly defined image of a ventriloquist dummy’s face, sent from the televisor’s electromechanical transmitter to its receiver. He also demonstrated the televisor with a human subject, who observers could see speaking and moving on the screen. For this, Baird is often credited with the first public demonstration of television.

John Logie Baird [shown here] used the heads of ventriloquist dummies in early experiments because they didn’t mind the heat and bright lights of his televisor. Science History Images/Alamy

How the Nipkow Disk Led to Baird’s Televisor

To be clear, Baird didn’t invent television. Television is one of those inventions that benefited from many contributors, collaborators, and competitors. Baird’s starting point was an idea for an “electric telescope,” patented in 1885 by German engineer Paul Nipkow.

Nipkow’s apparatus captured a picture by dividing it into a vertical sequence of lines, using a spinning disk with perforated holes around the edge. The perforations were offset in a spiral so that each hole captured one slice of the image in turn—known today as scan lines. Each line would be encoded as an electrical signal. A receiving apparatus converted the signals into light, to reconstruct the image. Nipkow never commercialized his electric telescope, though, and after 15 years the patent expired.

The inset on the left shows how the televisor split an image (in this case, a person’s face) into vertical lines. Bettmann/Getty Images

The system that Baird demonstrated in 1926 used two Nipkow disks, one in the transmitting apparatus and the other in the receiving apparatus. Each disk had 30 holes. He fitted the disk with glass lenses that focused the reflected light onto a photoelectric cell. As the transmitting disk rotated, the photoelectric cell detected the change in brightness coming through the individual lenses and converted the light into an electrical signal.

This signal was then sent to the receiving system. (Part of the receiving apparatus, housed at the Science Museum in London, is shown at top.) There the process was reversed, with the electrical signal first being amplified and then modulating a neon gas–discharge lamp. The light passed through a rectangular slot to focus it onto the receiving Nipkow disk, which was turning at the same speed as the transmitter. The image could be seen on a ground glass plate.

Early experiments used a dummy because the many incandescent lights needed to provide sufficient illumination made it too hot and bright for a person. Each hole in the disk captured only a small bit of the overall image, but as long as the disk spun fast enough, the brain could piece together the complete image, a phenomenon known as persistence of vision. (In a 2022 Hands On column, Markus Mierse explains how to build a modern Nipkow-disk electromechanical TV using a 3D printer, an LED module, and an Arduino Mega microcontroller.)

John Logie Baird and “True Television”

Regular readers of this column know the challenge of documenting historical “firsts”—the first radio, the first telegraph, the first high-tech prosthetic arm. Baird’s claim to the first public broadcast of television is no different. To complicate matters, the actual first demonstration of his televisor wasn’t on 26 January 1926 in front of those esteemed members of the Royal Institution; rather, it occurred in March 1925 in front of curious shoppers at a Selfridges department store.

As Donald F. McLean recounts in his excellent June 2022 article “Before ‘True Television’: Investigating John Logie Baird’s 1925 Original Television Apparatus,” Baird used a similar device for the Selfridges demo, but it had only 16 holes, organized as two groups of eight, hence its nickname the Double-8. The resolution was about as far from high definition as you could get, showing shadowy silhouettes in motion. Baird didn’t consider this “true television,” as McLean notes in his Proceedings of the IEEE piece.

In 1926, Baird loaned part of the televisor he used in his Selfridges demo to the Science Museum in London.PA Images/Getty Images

Writing in December 1926 in Experimental Wireless & The Wireless Engineer, Baird defined true television as “the transmission of the image of an object with all gradations of light, shade, and detail, so that it is seen on the receiving screen as it appears to the eye of an actual observer.” Consider the Selfridges demo a beta test and the one for the Royal Institution the official unveiling. (In 2017, the IEEE chose to mark the latter and not the former with a Milestone.)

The 1926 demonstration was a turning point in Baird’s career. In 1927 he established the Baird Television Development Co., and a year later he made the first transatlantic television transmission, from London to Hartsdale, N.Y. In 1929, the BBC decided to give Baird’s system a try, performing some experimental broadcasts outside of normal hours. After that, mechanical television took off in Great Britain and a few other European countries.

The BBC used various versions of Baird’s mechanical system from 1929 to 1937, starting with the 30-line system and upgrading to a 240-line system. But eventually the BBC switched to the all-electronic system developed by Marconi-EMI. Baird then switched to working on one of the earliest electronic color television systems, called the Telechrome. (Baird had already demonstrated a successful mechanical color television system in 1928, but it never caught on.) Meanwhile, in the United States, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) attempted to develop a mechanical color television system based on Baird’s original idea of a color wheel but finally ceded to an electronic standard in 1953.

Baird also experimented with stereoscopic or three-dimensional television and a 1,000-line display, similar to today’s high-definition television. Unfortunately, he died in 1946 before he could persuade anyone to take up that technology.

In a 1969 interview in TV Times, John’s widow, Margaret Baird, reflected on some of the developments in television that would have made her husband happy. He would enjoy the massive amounts of sports coverage available, she said. (Baird had done the first live broadcast of the Epsom Derby in 1931.) He would be thrilled with current affairs programs. And, my personal favorite, she thought he would love the annual broadcasting of the Eurovision song contest.

Other TV Inventors: Philo Farnsworth, Vladimir Zworykin

But as I said, television is an invention that’s had many contributors. Across the Atlantic, Philo Farnsworth was experimenting with an all-electrical system that he had first envisioned as a high school student in 1922. By 1926, Farnsworth had secured enough financial backing to work full time on his idea.

One of his main inventions was the image dissector, also known as a dissector tube. This video camera tube creates a temporary electron image that can be converted into an electrical signal. On 7 September 1927, Farnsworth and his team successfully transmitted a single black line, followed by other images of simple shapes. But the system could only handle silhouettes, not three-dimensional objects.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Zworykin was also experimenting with electronic television. In 1923, he applied for a patent for a video tube called the iconoscope. But it wasn’t until 1931, after he joined RCA, that his team developed a working version, which suspiciously came after Zworykin visited Farnsworth’s lab in California. The iconoscope overcame some of the dissector tube’s deficiencies, especially the storage capacity. It was also more sensitive and easier to manufacture. But one major drawback of both the image dissector and the iconoscope was that, like Baird’s original televisor, they required very bright lights.

Everyone was working to develop a better tube, but Farnsworth claimed that he’d invented both the concept of an electronic image moving through a vacuum tube as well as the idea of a storage-type camera tube. The iconoscope and any future improvements all depended on these progenitor patents. RCA knew this and offered to buy Farnsworth’s patents, but Farnsworth refused to sell. A multiyear patent-interference case ensued, finally finding for Farnsworth in 1935.

While the case was being litigated, Farnsworth made the first public demonstration of an all-electric television system on 25 August 1934 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. And in 1939, RCA finally agreed to pay royalties to Farnsworth to use his patented technologies. But Farnsworth was never able to compete commercially with RCA and its all-electric television system, which went on to dominate the U.S. television market.

Eventually, Harold Law, Paul Weimer, and Russell Law developed a better tube at their Princeton labs, the image orthicon. Designed for TV-guided missiles for the U.S. military, it was 100 to 1,000 times as sensitive as the iconoscope. After World War II, RCA quickly adopted the tube for its TV cameras. The image orthicon became the industry standard by 1947, remaining so until 1968 and the move to color TV.

The Path to Television Was Not Obvious

My Greek teacher hated the word “television.” He considered it an abomination that combined the Greek prefix telos (far off) with a Latin base, videre (to see). But early television was a bit of an abomination—no one really knew what it was going to be. As Chris Horrocks lays out in his delightfully titled book, The Joy of Sets (2017), television was developed in relation to the media that came before—telegraph, telephone, radio, and film.

Was television going to be like a telegraph, with communication between two points and an image slowly reassembled? Was it going to be like a telephone, with direct and immediate dialog between both ends? Was it going to be like film, with prerecorded images played back to a wide audience? Or would it be more like radio, which at the time was largely live broadcasts? At the beginning, people didn’t even know they wanted a television; manufacturers had to convince them.

And technically, there were many competing visions—Baird’s, Farnsworth’s, Zworykin’s, and others. It’s no wonder that television took many years, with lots of false starts and dead ends, before it finally took hold.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the September 2024 print issue as “The Mechanical TV.”

Late Thursday evening, Oprah Winfrey aired a special on AI, appropriately titled “AI and the Future of Us.” Guests included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, tech influencer Marques Brownlee, and current FBI director Christopher Wray. The dominant tone was one of skepticism — and wariness. Oprah noted in prepared remarks that the AI genie is out […]

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A transparent television might seem like magic, but both LG and Samsung demonstrated such displays this past January in Las Vegas at CES 2024. And those large transparent TVs, which attracted countless spectators peeking through video images dancing on their screens, were showstoppers.

Although they are indeed impressive, transparent TVs are not likely to appear—or disappear—in your living room any time soon. Samsung and LG have taken two very different approaches to achieve a similar end—LG is betting on OLED displays, while Samsung is pursuing microLED screens—and neither technology is quite ready for prime time. Understanding the hurdles that still need to be overcome, though, requires a deeper dive into each of these display technologies.

How does LG’s see-through OLED work?

OLED stands for organic light-emitting diode, and that pretty much describes how it works. OLED materials are carbon-based compounds that emit light when energized with an electrical current. Different compounds produce different colors, which can be combined to create full-color images.

To construct a display from these materials, manufacturers deposit them as thin films on some sort of substrate. The most common approach arranges red-, green-, and blue-emitting (RGB) materials in patterns to create a dense array of full-color pixels. A display with what is known as 4K resolution contains a matrix of 3,840 by 2,160 pixels—8.3 million pixels in all, formed from nearly 25 million red, green, and blue subpixels.

The timing and amount of electrical current sent to each subpixel determines how much light it emits. So by controlling these currents properly, you can create the desired image on the screen. To accomplish this, each subpixel must be electrically connected to two or more transistors, which act as switches. Traditional wires wouldn’t do for this, though: They’d block the light. You need to use transparent (or largely transparent) conductive traces.

LG’s demonstration of transparent OLED displays at CES 2024 seemed almost magical. Ethan Miller/Getty Images

A display has thousands of such traces arranged in a series of rows and columns to provide the necessary electrical connections to each subpixel. The transistor switches are also fabricated on the same substrate. That all adds up to a lot of materials that must be part of each display. And those materials must be carefully chosen for the OLED display to appear transparent.

The conductive traces are the easy part. The display industry has long used indium tin oxide as a thin-film conductor. A typical layer of this material is only 135 nanometers thick but allows about 80 percent of the light impinging on it to pass through.

The transistors are more of a problem, because the materials used to fabricate them are inherently opaque. The solution is to make the transistors as small as you can, so that they block the least amount of light. The amorphous silicon layer used for transistors in most LCD displays is inexpensive, but its low electron mobility means that transistors composed of this material can only be made so small. This silicon layer can be annealed with lasers to create low-temperature polysilicon, a crystallized form of silicon, which improves electron mobility, reducing the size of each transistor. But this process works only for small sheets of glass substrate.

Faced with this challenge, designers of transparent OLED displays have turned to indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO). This material has high enough electron mobility to allow for smaller transistors than is possible with amorphous silicon, meaning that IGZO transistors block less light.

These tactics help solve the transparency problem, but OLEDs have some other challenges. For one, exposure to oxygen or water vapor destroys the light-emissive materials. So these displays need an encapsulating layer, something to cover their surfaces and edges. Because this layer creates a visible gap when two panels are placed edge to edge, you can’t tile a set of smaller displays to create a larger one. If you want a big OLED display, you need to fabricate a single large panel.

The result of even the best engineering here is a “transparent” display that still blocks some light. You won’t mistake LG’s transparent TV for window glass: People and objects behind the screen appear noticeably darker than when viewed directly. According to one informed observer, the LG prototype appears to have 45 percent transparency.

How does Samsung’s magical MicroLED work?

For its transparent displays, Samsung is using inorganic LEDs. These devices, which are very efficient at converting electricity into light, are commonplace today: in household lightbulbs, in automobile headlights and taillights, and in electronic gear, where they often show that the unit is turned on.

In LED displays, each pixel contains three LEDs, one red, one green, and one blue. This works great for the giant digital displays used in highway billboards or in sports-stadium jumbotrons, whose images are meant to be viewed from a good distance. But up close, these LED pixel arrays are noticeable.

TV displays, on the other hand, are meant to be viewed from modest distances and thus require far smaller LEDs than the chips used in, say, power-indicator lights. Two years ago, these “microLED” displays used chips that were just 30 by 50 micrometers. (A typical sheet of paper is 100 micrometers thick.) Today, such displays use chips less than half that size: 12 by 27 micrometers.

While transparent displays are stunning, they might not be practical for home use as televisions. Expect to see them adopted first as signage in retail settings. AUO

These tiny LED chips block very little light, making the display more transparent. The Taiwanese display maker AUO recently demonstrated a microLED display with more than 60 percent transparency.

Oxygen and moisture don’t affect microLEDs, so they don’t need to be encapsulated. This makes it possible to tile smaller panels to create a seamless larger display. And the silicon coating on such small panels can be annealed to create polysilicon, which performs better than IGZO, so the transistors can be even smaller and block less light.

But the microLED approach has its own problems. Indeed, the technology is still in its infancy, with costing a great deal to manufacture and requiring some contortions to get uniform brightness and color across the entire display.

For example, individual OLED materials emit a well-defined color, but that’s not the case for LEDs. Minute variations in the physical characteristics of an LED chip can alter the wavelength of light it emits by a measurable—and noticeable—amount. Manufacturers have typically addressed this challenge by using a binning process: They test thousands of chips and then group them into bins of similar wavelengths, discarding those that don’t fit the desired ranges. This explains in part why those large digital LED screens are so expensive: Many LEDs created for their construction must be discarded.

But binning doesn’t really work when dealing with microLEDs. The tiny chips are difficult to test and are so expensive that costs would be astronomical if too many had to be rejected.

Though you can see through today’s transparent displays, they do block a noticeable amount of light, making the background darker than when viewed directly. Tekla S. Perry

Instead, manufacturers test microLED displays for uniformity after they’re assembled, then calibrate them to adjust the current applied to each subpixel so that color and brightness are uniform across the display. This calibration process, which involves scanning an image on the panel and then reprogramming the control circuitry, can sometimes require thousands of iterations.

Then there’s the problem of assembling the panels. Remember those 25 million microLED chips that make up a 4K display? Each must be positioned precisely, and each must be connected to the correct electrical contacts.

The LED chips are initially fabricated on sapphire wafers, each of which contains chips of only one color. These chips must be transferred from the wafer to a carrier to hold them temporarily before applying them to the panel backplane. The Taiwanese microLED company PlayNitride has developed a process for creating large tiles with chips spaced less than 2 micrometers apart. Its process for positioning these tiny chips has better than 99.9 percent yields. But even at a 99.9 percent yield, you can expect about 25,000 defective subpixels in a 4K display. They might be positioned incorrectly so that no electrical contact is made, or the wrong color chip is placed in the pattern, or a subpixel chip might be defective. While correcting these defects is sometimes possible, doing so just adds to the already high cost.

Samsung’s microLED technology allows the image to extend right up to the edge of the glass panel, making it possible to create larger displays by tiling smaller panels together. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Could MicroLEDs still be the future of flat-panel displays? “Every display analyst I know believes that microLEDs should be the ‘next big thing’ because of their brightness, efficiency, color, viewing angles, response times, and lifetime, “ says Bob Raikes, editor of the 8K Monitor newsletter. “However, the practical hurdles of bringing them to market remain huge. That Apple, which has the deepest pockets of all, has abandoned microLEDs, at least for now, and after billions of dollars in investment, suggests that mass production for consumer markets is still a long way off.”

At this juncture, even though microLED technology offers some clear advantages, OLED is more cost-effective and holds the early lead for practical applications of transparent displays.

But what is a transparent display good for?

Samsung and LG aren’t the only companies to have demonstrated transparent panels recently.

AUO’s 60-inch transparent display, made of tiled panels, won the People’s Choice Award for Best MicroLED-Based Technology at the Society for Information Display’s Display Week, held in May in San Jose, Calif. And the Chinese company BOE Technology Group demonstrated a 49-inch transparent OLED display at CES 2024.

These transparent displays all have one feature in common: They will be insanely expensive. Only LG’s transparent OLED display has been announced as a commercial product. It’s without a price or a ship date at this point, but it’s not hard to guess how costly it will be, given that nontransparent versions are expensive enough. For example, LG prices its top-end 77-inch OLED TV at US $4,500.

Displays using both microLED technology [above] and OLED technology have some components in each pixel that block light coming from the background. These include the red, green, and blue emissive materials along with the transistors required to switch them on and off. Smaller components mean that you can have a larger transmissive space that will provide greater transparency. Illustration: Mark Montgomery; Source: Samsung

Thanks to seamless tiling, transparent microLED displays can be larger than their OLED counterparts. But their production costs are larger as well. Much larger. And that is reflected in prices. For example, Samsung’s nontransparent 114-inch microLED TV sells for $150,000. We can reasonably expect transparent models to cost even more.

Seeing these prices, you really have to ask: What are the practical applications of transparent displays?

Don’t expect these displays to show up in many living rooms as televisions. And high price is not the only reason. After all, who wants to see their bookshelves showing through in the background while they’re watching Dune? That’s why the transparent OLED TV LG demonstrated at CES 2024 included a “contrast layer”—basically, a black cloth—that unrolls and covers the back of the display on demand.

Transparent displays could have a place on the desktop—not so you can see through them, but so that a camera can sit behind the display, capturing your image while you’re looking directly at the screen. This would help you maintain eye contact during a Zoom call. One company—Veeo—demonstrated a prototype of such a product at CES 2024, and it plans to release a 30-inch model for about $3,000 and a 55-inch model for about $8,500 later this year. Veeo’s products use LG’s transparent OLED technology.

Transparent screens are already showing up as signage and other public-information displays. LG has installed transparent 55-inch OLED panels in the windows of Seoul’s new high-speed underground rail cars, which are part of a system known as the Great Train eXpress. Riders can browse maps and other information on these displays, which can be made clear when needed for passengers to see what’s outside.

LG transparent panels have also been featured in an E35e excavator prototype by Doosan Bobcat. This touchscreen display can act as the operator’s front or side window, showing important machine data or displaying real-time images from cameras mounted on the vehicle. Such transparent displays can serve a similar function as the head-up displays in some aircraft windshields.

And so, while the large transparent displays are striking, you’ll be more likely to see them initially as displays for machinery operators, public entertainment, retail signage, and even car windshields. The early adopters might cover the costs of developing mass-production processes, which in turn could drive prices down. But even if costs eventually reach reasonable levels, whether the average consumer really want a transparent TV in their home is something that remains to be seen—unlike the device itself, whose whole point is not to be.