Samsung Starts Shipping New P Series Of Tizen-powered Smart Displays

October 17, 2016 by Dave Haynes

Samsung has launched a new P-Series line of smart signage displays that are the first shipping with the Tizen operating system – the OS the company is shifting most or all of its information devices over to.

The series has seven models, including 55-inch, 49-inch and 43-inch displays with 700 nits, 55-inch, 49-inch and 43-inch displays with 500 nits and a 32-inch display with 400 nits. All the displays have a depth design of 29.9mm and 6.9mm narrow bezels. The system on chip has a quad-core processor.

This is the 4th generation of Samsung Smart Signage displays to come on the market – and the most powerful. The earlier versions of Samsung’s SoC got mixed reviews and were generally regarded as underpowered and limited in what they could deliver in terms of visual performance. Hardware advances have addressed that, but the shift to Tizen means software companies that choose to work with it have a cross-architecture, open-source software platform built on Linux and HTML5-ready, supporting animated graphics.

It also means beyond CMS companies, it will be relatively easy for developers already working with Tizen on other smart devices – from phones to fridges – to develop for these large screens.

The display series line is new, but Samsung has been indicating for some time its intentions to go Tizen for its digital signage smart displays, and announced as much in June.

I spoke with Kevin Schroll, director of Samsung Electronics America’s Smart Signage product group, at Infocomm, back in June, about the platform, and how marketplace adoption is now accelerating. “Customers like the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of the SoC displays,” Schroll told me. “SoC is where everything is going. Within a few years, you are only going to see separate media players for super high-end 4K, feature-rich environments. Everything else can be driven by Smart Signage with embedded SoC media players.”

There remain doubters out there – but with Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Philips and now NEC all having some variation of smart displays, it would seem the market is moving more and more to embedded media players and away from systems running off PCs. There are exceptions, of course, like the million or so BrightSign boxes out there, and specialty cases like video walls or graphically-intense signage projects that need more than what any embedded device can deliver, particularly without a dedicated graphics card.

For more background on Tizen, here’s a piece I wrote for Samsung recently …