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Lego bricks come in a ridiculously vast array of sizes and shapes, but the company is unveiling an entirely new take on its classic shape at CES 2026. Meet the Lego Smart Brick, a standard-sized 2 x 4 brick thats packed with modern technology to enable sets that can respond to how theyre played with or the sets you build. Its part of a new initiative called Smart Play, which encompasses the Smart Brick as well as Smart Minifigures and Smart Tags. While we obviously dont know yet how Lego fans will take to this new system, its still fair to say its the biggest move Lego has every made to infuse its products with connected technology. The Smart Brick has a 4.1mm ASIC chip inside of it that Lego says is smaller than a standard Lego stud. It runs something called the Play Engine that can sense things like motion, orientation and magnetic fields. Thanks to this and some integrated copper coils, the Smart Brick can sense distance, direction and orientation of other Smart Bricks near it when youre building. The brick also has a tiny built-in speaker, an accelerometer and an LED array. Lego says the speaker can produce audio that is tied to live play actions rather than just playing pre-recorded clips. The Smart Tag and Smart Minifigures are a lot simpler. The Tag is a 2 x 2 studless tile with a digital ID embedded in it that the Smart Brick can read via near-field magnetic communication. This obviously sounds a lot like NFC, but we cant be sure that these new Lego pieces will be able to communicate with any other NFC devices. Similarly, the Smart Minifigure also has a digital ID readable by NFC. The purpose of the Smart Tag as well as the similar tech in a Smart Minifigure is to let the Smart Brick know what kind of context it is being used in. As Lego puts it, The role of the Smart Tag is to tell the Smart Brick how it should play back with you. The Tag tells the Brick what kind of object, animal, vehicle and so forth it should become. A Smart Tag in a Lego Star Wars X-Wing set, for example, will contain the unique ID and instructions for how the Smart Brick should behave. If this isnt enough, Lego has also built a local wireless layer that connects this all together called BrickNet. Its based on Bluetooth and uses Legos proprietary Neighbor Position Measurement" system, which is what lets the Smart Bricks know how close they are to each other and how theyre oriented. Lego says that this lets the bricks talk to each other directly without the need for apps, internet connections or external controls. It sounds like the idea is all three of these new Smart pieces can communicate and interact without any need for setup, which should make it refreshingly like a traditional Lego set. That said, these bricks naturally will need some power. Lego says that their batteries should still perform even after years of inactivity, and the coils and power system is designed so that multiple bricks can be charged wirelessly on a shared charging pad. Lego Star Wars set with Smart Bricks Lego Speaking of sets, Lego is unsurprisingly launching the Smart Play system with its biggest licensed partner: Star Wars. There will be three all-in-one Star Wars sets available, all of which are on the smaller side and definitely geared towards kids, rather than the 1,000 piece and up sets that the company has released to get adults (like me) interested. The prices are inflated compared to non-smart sets, but not outrageously so. Darth Vaders TIE Fighter is a 473-piece set with a smart Darth Vader Minifigure, one Smart Brick and one Smart Tag, priced at $70. Lukes Red Five X-Wing is a 584-piece set with two Smart Minifigures, one Smart Brick and five Smart Tags, priced at $100. The Throne Room Duel & A-wing is a 962-piece set with three Smart Minifigures, two Smart Bricks and five Smart Tags, priced at a slightly shocking $160. Its an entirely new direction for Lego, and you wont have to wait long to check it out. The company is putting those three sets up for pre-order on January 9, and theyll launch on March 1. Theres obviously a lot of technology here thats entirely new to Lego, and as such its hard to imagine just how this will all look when it comes together but were hoping that Lego will have some sets on hand here at CES so we can get a closer look at how the Smart Play system works. In the meantime, you can find a few videos on how Smart Play works here. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/lego-unveils-a-technology-packed-smart-brick-at-ces-2026-190000511.html?src=rss
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Micro RGB TVs first arrived last year with little fanfare and a confusing name, so you may have mistaken it for other panel tech or not even noticed. That is not likely to be the case this year, though its the hot new luxury display technology and is all over the place at CES 2026. So why do we even need these new TVs and how are they different from OLED, Micro LED and Mini LED models? Heres how it works and how it compares. A brief history of flat panel display tech To better understand Micro RGB, it helps to see how flat panel display technology has evolved over the last 20 years. The first LCD TVs used liquid crystals that become transparent to light when voltage is applied, letting a rear backlight shine through as a pixel. Those pixels combine to create moving or still images, with color created via an RGB filter layer placed in front. The main problem is that LCD crystals let some light partially leak through, so blacks are dark grey instead of pure black. And for a backlight, early LCD TVs used a white screen lit by dim and power-hungry fluorescent lights, which caused uneven light distribution. And finally, the RGB filter color layer reduced a panels brightness. The next step up, then, was to use LED backlights instead, placed at first at the edges of the white screen and then later directly behind it (the first TV with this tech was Sonys 2004 Qualia). That added the benefits of higher brightness, lower power consumption, improved color balance and even light distribution. It also allowed individual dimming zones that improve contrast by allowing near-pure blacks in shadow areas of an image. Samsung's Neo QLED 8K TV from CES 2025Samsung Quantum dot (QD) technology came on the scene around 2013 with Sonys Triluminos televisions. This type of LCD panel employs a semiconductor nanocrystal layer (rather than an RGB filter layer) that can produce pure monochromatic red, green, and blue light when struck with a blue backlight. Unlike previous LCDs, they offer higher brightness and color accuracy thanks to the purity (narrowness) of the base RGB colors. The best-known TVs using this tech are Samsungs QLED models. The latest evolution of QD LED technology is Mini LED. That combines the accuracy of quantum dot tech with hundreds or even thousands of LED dimming zones. Those models offer high brightness and color accuracy along with good contrast, but still dont deliver perfect blacks and can display blooming in scenes with bright points of light due to leakage into neighboring pixels. Both of those problems were solved with OLED technology, which first came on the market in 2007 with Sonys XEL-1 model. The panels are made using sheets coated with organic LEDs, each paired with a transistor that can switch the LED on or off. On regular OLED TVs, OLED pixels are white and a filter layer generates colors, much as with LED TVs. However, with QD-OLEDs, OLED pixels are blue and color is created via a quantum dot layer, like LED QD displays. The latest version of QD-OLED featured on several new monitors at CES 2026 (Samsungs 5th-gen QD-OLED) uses an RGB stripe pattern to reduce color fringing on text. This is the first, and still the only widely commercialized TV tech that can switch its light source off on a pixel-by-pixel basis, allowing perfect black levels and near-infinite contrast. However, due to their organic nature, OLED TVs suffer from a lack of brightness and the potential for burn-in that can kill pixels. There is another type of self-illuminating tech called Micro LED. Rather than organic, it uses microscopic inorganic LEDs to form the individual pixel elements. Those can also be turned on or off individually, so they offer the same pure blacks and sky-high contrast as OLED. At the same time theyre potentially brighter than OLED and dont suffer from burn-in. The tech is still prohibitively expensive to manufacture, though, so none have arrived to market other than Samsungs The Wall, which costs a cool $40,000. Micro RGB Devindra Hardawar for Engadget Before talking about Micro RGB, lets look at color space and gamut both for HDR, which uses the BT.2020 standard, and SDR, commonly associated with the REC.709 standard. REC.709 is ideal for regular HD content like TV broadcasts and YouTube videos. It can display a limited set of colors and brightness is generally capped at 100 nits. BT.2020, however, is designed for high-end HDR streaming and 4K or 8K content creation (via Dolby Vision, HDR 10 or HDR10+). It has a much wider color gamut, meaning it can display a wider variety of colors and a bigger chunk of the visible color spectrum. Its also designed for significantly higher brightness levels of 1,000 nits or more. To achieve the color accuracy required for BT.2020, TVs must have extremely accurate red, green and blue pixels. Up until last year, the most color-accurate TVs used quantum dot technology and achieved a maximum of around 85 percent BT.2020 coverage (some projectors can cover 100 percent or more of the BT.2020 spectrum as they use RGB lasers to create colors). That brings us to Micro RGB (also known as RGB Mini LED), the most advanced LED panel yet. Unlike the uniform white or blue backlights found on Mini LED models, it features individually-controlled, precise red, green and blue LED backlights that shine through a liquid crystal layer. It also offers more local dimming zones. The net result is higher color accuracy and better contrast than regular Mini LED displays, but with potentially greater brightness than OLED. Since each pixel still cant be turned on and off like OLED or Micro LED, though, contrast falls short of those technologies. Wikipedia So far, there is one and only one Micro RGB TV on the market, Samsungs 115-inch 4K MR95F model. The color accuracy is impressive with 100 percent coverage of the challenging BT.2020 HDR standard, an industry-first and huge leap over quantum dot tech. That means it can produce billions of colors natively and display a higher percentage of them in the visible spectrum than any TV to date. Samsung left out a few key specs like the local dimming zone count, only saying that it has four times more than its similarly-priced 115-inch Q90F QLED model (so likely around 3,600). The company also failed to disclose the total brightness in nits, but the figure should be impressive given the potential of Micro RGB. We were gobsmacked with the MR95F Micro RGB model in person. Engadget editor Sam Rutherford said it produced stunningly rich and vivid colors that put Samsungs other top-tier TVs to shame, including the aforementioned Q90F. It also came with an equally stunning $29,999 price tag. A couple of other manufacturers including HiSense have also released RGB Mini LED models similar to Samsungs Micro RGB, but they differ slightly in that the RGB modules are larger than the ones found on Samsungs latest TVs. Which companies will have Micro RGB tech at CES 2026? Samsung Luckily, the number of Micro RGB TVs is about to dramatically increase. Earlier this month, Samsung announced a full lineup using the technology with 55-, 65-, 75-, 85-, 100- and 115-inch screen sizes, saying theyd set a new standard for premium home viewing. Those sets will also offer 100 percent BT.2020 HDR coverage under a new certification standard called Micro RGB Precision Color 100. While certainly likely to carry more reasonable prices than the first model, theyll probably still be Samsungs most expensive TVs when released later this year. And on Sunday, Samsung also revealed a 130-inch Micro RGB prototype meant to showcase the technology. Once again, it blew us away partially just because of the huge size, but also due to the incredible "color accuracy and richness," as Engadget editor Devindra Hardawar put it. "I couldnt help but notice how everyone just looked a bit stunned, like the monkeys from 2001 seeing the monolith for the first time," he added. At the same time, LG announced its first Micro RGB evo TV lineup in 75-, 86- and 100-inch models. The company is also promising 100 percent BT.2020 color gamut coverage and said the sets will have over a thousand local dimming zones for color control. Not only that, it said that its new TVs will deliver 100 percent coverage in SDR modes as well, both for Adobe RGB and the challenge P3 standard. It was interesting to compare LG's Wallpaper and other OLED sets with the new Micro RGB tech, with our editor Devindra again being amazed. "LG already announced its Micro RGB set a few weeks ago, but that didn't prepare me for standing in front of the 100-inch demo TV it brought to CES," he said. "Throughout a variety of clips, colors looked wonderfully rich, and the overall texture of the images looked surprisingly life-like."This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/home-theater/what-are-micro-rgb-tvs-and-why-are-they-everywhere-at-ces-2026-182441543.html?src=rss
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Netflix just announced the pending release of a Stranger Things documentary, hot on the heels of the series finale. It premieres on January 12. One Last Adventure focuses on the making of season five, so it's not a full series retrospective. This seems similar to what Disney+ does a few weeks after a popular Star Wars or Marvel show drops. Still, it's a documentary about the very last season of the show, so there's likely to be some tearful goodbyes and all of that jazz. As a matter of fact, the trailer shows plenty of hugs along with sit-down interviews. It'll shine a light on how some of the stunts and set pieces came together, which is cool. Stranger Things, after all, is primarily a show about spectacle and season five had plenty to spare. The Duffer Brothers will also discuss how they came to write some of those final character arcs (no spoilers here.) If you're grieving the loss of Steve Harrington, Delightful Derrick, Eleven and the rest, this should make for a nice watch. It's worth noting that while Stranger Things has doled out its last needle drop, the franchise itself is still going. The animated spinoff Stranger Things: Tales From '85 premieres later this year. There's also a live-action spinoff coming at some point. This will likely be another story in the same universe.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/a-stranger-things-making-of-documentary-hits-netflix-next-week-175539720.html?src=rss
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