Tag Archives: Rollable TV

This rollable display is a concept Samsung should take note of

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If you are putting a rollable screen device in your home, you might as well pick one that really stands out even when not in use.

Given how much they’ve been popping up in exhibits and trade shows, it’s probably inevitable that the next trend in home electronics would be rollable TVs and displays. It is, after all, one way to save space without sacrificing the benefits of traditional panels the way home projectors do. It’s also a great bragging right for owning an advanced piece of technology and an effective conversation starter at parties. Not everyone, however, might want a full-blown giant rollable panel, and there will be a market for things that sit in-between rollable TV and a rollable phone or tablet. These devices could take the place of speakers, video phones, and even clocks around the house, and they don’t have to stop working even when they’re rolled down, like how most rollable TVs would.

Designers: Cho Sunghwan, Lee Sooyeol, Park Youngeun, Lee Yewon, Kim Jeonghyun (Unichest)

Like any new technology being marketed to consumers, often at very high prices, there are many questions about the purpose and place of such fancy new devices in our lives. Outside of the cool factor, rollable TVs would allow homeowners to save up on space or remove the TV from sight while not using it. One problem with these rollable screens, at least the first-generation designs, is that they are completely out of sight when rolled inside, making them completely useless in that dormant state.

This Samsung rollable display concept, in contrast, has something like a middle ground, a third state where it’s rolled down but still useful. The screen doesn’t completely retract inside the housing, leaving a section of the display exposed. This area can be used to display information like the time, weather, music controls, and more. Given today’s display technologies, this mode could use up less power than when the full display is in use, allowing the device to still offer some functionality even in a limited form.

Part of what makes that function work is the unnamed device’s asymmetric design. Rather than a box or cylinder that houses the rolled screen, it has more of an arched shape that has part of its top chopped off. Ironically, this design does get in the way when the full screen is extended since a part of the display will always be occluded. It will require a custom user interface that’s slightly different from the Android-based UI shown in the concept.

This rollable display concept was made for Samsung back in 2019, but recent events seem to have shelved plans, or the design didn’t get the company’s approval. It definitely requires a bit more work to pull off compared to a more straightforward rollable TV, but it also offers Samsung the opportunity to differentiate and make an impact. It could be what Samsung needs right now, especially with LG dominating the rollable news and the designer TV scene these days.

The post This rollable display is a concept Samsung should take note of first appeared on Yanko Design.

LG’s Rollable TV was just the beginning. Here’s a crazy new concept of a rolling screen that can change sizes and aspect ratios

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Let’s get our terminology straight right at the very beginning – the SHIFT is an adaptive rollable TV, not just a regular rollable one. That’s just a fancy way of saying that instead of having a scroll-shaped display that sits hidden inside a small chamber and unrolls to reveal itself (like LG’s Rollable TV), the SHIFT is ‘adaptive’, which means it shifts or adapts between two formats – a smaller monitor-sized display, and a larger television-sized one.

The common justification of a rolling display is to have a television that can ‘disappear’ when you don’t need it, but the SHIFT creates a new sort of format. Instead of disappearing when you don’t need it, the SHIFT’s format explores an A vs B arrangement, where you can alternate between two screen sizes, choosing a smaller one while working at your desk, and a larger one for sitting back and watching a movie. To manage this, the SHIFT uses a display that extends sideways while rotating too (the GIF above should really explain how it works), effectively being able to expand in BOTH directions. The expanded display isn’t just wider, it’s taller too because the entire display rotates 90° while rolling open (so the horizontal width of the smaller screen becomes the vertical height of the larger screen).

The justification for this ‘adaptive rolling display’ is less of a cosmetic one and more of a functional one. While LG’s Rollable TV was designed to disappear into its base so you’re not left with an ugly black rectangle on your wall when the TV’s switched off, the SWITCH doesn’t really focus on the aesthetics of a disappearing TV, but rather tries to be dually functional, as a smaller work monitor, and as a larger television/entertainment system.

In serving its work purpose, the SHIFT comes with a rather interesting design detail concealed within its form. One of the rolling elements on the SHIFT’s bezel features a swiveling webcam that can rotate to face outwards when in use, and back into its dark void when not needed. When you’re working, or even joining large video conferences, the webcam swivels out and captures you while the screen itself shape-shifts to accommodate the web layout.

A notable feature of the SHIFT’s design is also its ability to change aspect ratio. The rolling screen is natively 21:9 in its smallest and largest formats, but it fills in a lot of intermediary aspect ratios too, going to 16:9 when you’re watching widescreen content, or even 4:3 for older shows or applications that run in 4:3. If you’re using the SHIFT to run an emulation of content on your phone, the rotating display can be used in portrait mode too, and can expand ever so slightly to mimic a tablet’s aspect ratio if needed.

For all that innovation packed in a somewhat utilitarian format that aims to ‘have your cake and eat it too’, the SHIFT isn’t a utilitarian-looking appliance. On the contrary, it’s incredibly well designed, sleek, and can shapeshift between the monitor and TV mode while looking ever so classy. The screen is backed by a fabric-clad panel that houses all the electronics and elements like the SHIFT’s speakers. The backside of the fabric panel even has a cable concealer that lets you hide all the ports, so no matter whether you look at the front, the side, or the back of the SHIFT, it looks incredibly clean and sophisticated, almost with the air of Samsung’s Serif TV.

Ultimately though, the SHIFT balances multiple roles and is designed to be used in different parts of the house. Unlike its LG counterpart, which focuses solely on using the rollable technology to make the TV as sleek and nonexistent as possible, SHIFT wants to be the TV that you also use in your WFH setup as well as for binge-watching Money Heist in the living room. The TV features a wheeled easel-style base that can conveniently be pushed around the house (just avoid the carpets), and the fabric clads on the back sport a palette of home-decor-friendly colors that should easily fit into most contemporary homes or office spaces.

Designers: Seungho Ro & Junha Kam

This conceptual rollable tv solves the one issue with other rollable TVs

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Rollable TVs are not new, they definitely make our walls look cleaner but you know what they still continue to do like their traditional predecessors? Occupy shelf space. I have lived in New York and let me tell you – if anything requires you to buy more furniture to support it, it’s not going to work because we don’t have space. What I could have really used during my time in the Big Apple would have been this small innovative solution, the conceptual Rollean TV that is built into a shelf BOOM! Rollable TV? Shelf? This shape-shifting appliance plays a double “roll”.

Unlike the retail industry scam of ‘built-in shelf’ bras, the Rollean TV has been truly designed on the idealogy of a built-in-shelf. This is genius for a couple of reasons, the first being you don’t have to spend more money on getting furniture to support your TV and second being the TV is actually able to support your things which would otherwise be strewn all over the place (like car keys, house keys, the keys to your future). This rollable TV concept blends with your interiors, it is minimal and sleek, unlike the usual TV stands. You simply roll out the screen when you watch to binge Netflix and slide it back to turn it into a table – ninja skills!

You can lean it against a wall and roll the screen down or if you have existing furniture but don’t like the bulkiness of your TV, simply rest it on the shelf and pull the screen up, no bending required. When not being used, only a part of the TV remains exposed and shows the time which means its not just a table, it is a smart table that will fit within any interior setting. Its unobtrusive, modern, and space-saving, almost like it was made for urban dwellers who are craving for a flexible lifestyle and space (pun intended!).

Designer: Joonhyuk Hong

LG’s TV lets the good times “roll”

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“Bigger is better” seems to be the common consensus with televisions, with Samsung literally making a television the size of a wall… but the ‘bigger’ question remains, when does size start becoming a hindrance? The large phone market stopped at around 6 inches because any bigger and the phone is literally too large to use, so the question remains, how big must a TV be to be the biggest it should be?

LG doesn’t really have an answer to that question, but it has a solution. Flexible displays. LG’s Rollable TV concept features a 65-inch mammoth of a screen that’s actually as flexible as fabric (and as a result, super thin), as it rolls into a housing that’s a fraction of its size. What’s more interesting is that this ability doesn’t necessarily mean a compromise on quality because the Rollable TV features a 4K UHD display. Did I also mention, it rolls up into a cylinder?!

Designer: LG Electronics

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