Samsung brings AI tech to its latest TV lineup to rival LG’s OLED TVs

Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest TV maker, said on Wednesday it is bringing artificial intelligence technology to its 2024 TV lineup to compete with its crosstown rival LG Electronics Inc., the dominant player in the organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TV segment.

At its Unbox & Discover 2024 launch event, Samsung unveiled its new Neo QLED and OLED TV lineup set to hit the domestic market this Friday.

The latest models are embedded with its AI technology, which the South Korean tech giant first unveiled with the flagship Galaxy S24 smartphone series.

“The Korean market is a key global market leading the trend of premium TVs and ultra-large TVs. The 2024 Samsung model is a culmination of Samsung Electronics' technological capabilities, which has maintained its No. 1 position in the global TV market for 18 years. We will open the era of AI TV,” said Yong Seok-woo, president and head of Samsung’s visual display division.

The top line, Neo QLED 8K, is equipped with the third-generation AI 8K processor, which has the highest performance among Samsung TVs. It has 512 neural networks.

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This chipset has eight times more neural networks than the processor used in last year's TVs. Its neural network processing unit (NPU) is twice as fast as last year's processor.

Thanks to the new processor, even low-resolution content is upscaled to 8K resolution for sharper visuals, Samsung said.

The Contrast Enhancer Pro feature uses neural networks to detect subjects in a scene and applies enhancements to certain objects and people to create a sense of depth, it said.

Samsung has also improved its Samsung TV Plus service to offer more personalized content on the home screen and more on-demand TV content.

Launched in 2015, Samsung TV Plus allows users to enjoy streaming services for free after watching advertisements.

Samsung said about 40,000 videos are available on Samsung TV Plus.

The company said security and connectivity between devices on its so-called Samsung AI TVs have also been strengthened through its on-device AI technology.

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Samsung’s Yong said the company also aims to narrow the gap with OLED TV leader LG Electronics.

“Over the past two years, our OLED TVs have shown rapid growth, with our segment market share rising to 23%. Our 77-inch OLED TV posted a higher market share than competitors’ products in Korea last year,” he said.

Globally, LG is the top OLED TV vendor, selling about 3 million such TVs in 2023 for a 53% market share.

On Wednesday, LG launched its 2024 OLED and QNED TV lineup with enhanced AI functions in the domestic market. 

LG said the Alpha 11 processor applied to the 2024 LG OLED Evo series boasts a fourfold improvement in AI deep-learning performance compared to the Alpha 9 processor used in its 2023 model year.

The Alpha 11 processor increases graphics performance by 70% and processing speed by 30% compared to the previous model, LG said.

Write to Eui-Myung Park at uimyung@hankyung.com

In-Soo Nam edited this article.