The Most Luxurious TV Ever Is Now Available To Order - For A Mere $233000 - Forbes

Luxury (with a capital L) brand C Seed has today announced that you can now order its unique N1 Outdoor TV. And all you need to set the process in motion ahead of the TVs finally being delivered in the first quarter of 2024 is a spare $233,000 (at least) hanging around in your bank account.

In a world where many households would struggle to find even one hundredth of that outlay for a TV, it’s fair to say that the C Seed N1 (which I first wrote about last July) isn’t exactly a mainstream proposition. If you do happen to have found a vein of gold in your garden, though, the N1 does actually have a pretty cool stab at justifying its extraordinary cost with a genuinely unique combination of futuristic design and screen technologies.

For starters, the two N1 models now confirmed for launch are huge: 137 and 165 inches across. That’s epic enough to make even a 65-inch TV look like a portable. Even cooler than their sheer scale, though, is the fact that they don’t always look that big. Remarkably they’re designed so that when you’re not watching them they can mechanically collapse down into stunning looking matt titanium colored metal boxes no bigger than a pool-side deck chair.

The way the screen can ‘fold in’ and then slide down into its metal box when not being watched is made possible by a combination of money-no-object design (inspired by the work of the Porsche Design Studio with 2014’s original C Seed 201 TV) and the fact that the screen is, remarkably, constructed using modular MicroLED technology, where incredibly bright but also contrast-rich pictures are created from screen’s stitched together from multiple smaller MicroLED modules.

C Seed has patented a new Adaptive Gap Calibration technology specifically for the N1s where high-resolution sensors detect potential offsets between the folding TV wings down to fractions of millimetres and automatically calibrate the MicroLEDs specific brightness to ensure that once the screens are fully unfolded (a process that only takes around 85 seconds), you won’t see any visible seams or gaps in the picture.

Photo: C Seed

If you read my original article on the N1 Outdoor TV last year, you may recall that the screen supports 4000 nits of claimed brightness (that’s way more than you get with regular TVs, and will help the pictures punch through the bright sunlight it may have to contend with on your patio/poolside/terrace), 16-bit colour processing, and support for the HDR10+ ‘active’ HDR format as well as the more basic HDR10 system. It also manages to incorporate a host of speakers, including two 100W broadband coaxial speakers and a subwoofer in its base, plus a couple more on each of the TV’s outer wings.

The N1’s outdoor credentials see it earning an IP65 weather rating, meaning it has the highest level of dust protection and can withstand low-pressure water jets from all directions, while the screen can be rotated through 180 degrees (90 degrees to left or right) so that a single screen can cater for separate outdoor areas rather than you having to install two…

MicroLED technology has long been heralded as the future of TV thanks to the way it combines the long life span and brightness potential of LCD technology with the sort of pixel-level light control associated with OLED technology. Difficulties with handling the tiny subpixels required by MicroLED displays at scale, though, have meant that the technology has so far found it impossible to become something that anyone but the uber-wealthy can afford. So much so that the sort of 4K-resolution MicroLED screen sizes being delivered by the C Seed N1 would have cost well into six figures even if they weren’t then combined with the N1’s unique motorised design, weatherproofing and audio features.

Photo: C Seed

One interesting change in C Seed’s update on the N1 versus the information that came out last year is that the 103-inch model originally scheduled to appear alongside the 137 and 165-inch models no longer seems to be happening. A casualty, I suspect, of the ongoing difficulties associated with trying to make 4K MicroLED screens work at at relatively ‘small’ sizes. The unfortunate result of this, of course, is that the ‘mere’ $190,000 price of entry to the N1 range offered by the 103-inch model is no longer available, leaving you needing to find $43,000 more before you can join the exclusive N1 club.

On the off chance that anyone reading this ends up buying one, I’d love it if you’d share your photos of the finished installation next year to my Twitter account (linked to at the end of this article). Also, could I borrow a tenner?

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