Have you ever tried to show photos and videos from your phone on the big screen TV for all your family to see? If you have, you’ve probably noticed everyone has to move that little bit closer to the screen, because your vertically-aligned phone screen doesn’t marry up with the widescreen nature of the beast hanging on your wall. Annoying, right?
But for every problem, there’s a solution, and Samsung has just come up with a doozy.
It’s called ‘The Sero’, and it’s a 47-inch (one size only for now) 4K QLED TV that can rotate a full 90-degrees so you can stream, cast and mirror content from your phone and view it as it was meant to be seen. Just, you know, much bigger.
It sounds completely bonkers, but in a world where we’re foldable and bendable screens are becoming the norm, a rotating screen shouldn’t seem that farfetched. Samsung uncoincidentally decided to show off The Sero – Korean for vertical – at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, which took place from the 7th to 10th of January 2020.
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It’s also been unveiled at a time where more and more of us are bending our necks down to be engrossed with content from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and whatever other new platforms the kids are into these days. It’s, therefore, no surprise that the target market for The Sero is Generation Z.
We can sort of understand why Samsung has created The Sero in the first place. If you’ve ever tried to cast content from your phone to your TV – photos, and videos of a recent holiday, for example – then you’ll be presented with a vertical image in the centre of the screen, with vast areas of darkness either side. The Sero negates such a first world problem – iPhone owners will, unfortunately, need to rotate the screen via the remote, Android owners get the luxury of automatic rotation.
And just because Samsung has put all its effort into creating a TV for the millennial masses, it hasn’t scrimped on the specs. You’re still getting a 4K QLED TV, which means colours, contrast, and brightness should all be some of the best around. Samsung itself already produces 8K TVs, but with content pretty scarce right now, 4K is the way to go.
The Sero is currently priced at 1.89m KRW (US$1,600/AU$2,300) in its homeland of Korea – where it has been available for some time – but Samsung has confirmed it will make its way to the US and UK. An Australian release is yet to be confirmed.