The luxury audio visual brand C Seed has announced that its jaw-dropping, super-exclusive, folding N1 Mini-LED television is now available to buy in the U.K., but its status as the pinnacle of TV technology means you’ll probably need to be a millionaire to buy it.
The C Seed N1 is a massive 4K TV featuring Transformer-like technology that allows it to fold itself up into a stylish metallic cabinet when not in use, then unfurl in spectacular fashion the moment it's switched back on.
The Austrian company has been dazzling audiences at technology expositions ever since it debuted the concept in 2022, appearing at CES 2024, IFA 2024, and most recently at the 2024 CEDIA Expo last week.
It was there that it announced the C Seed N1 will soon be available to buy at exclusive retailers in the U.K., and we’d wager that more than a few Premier League footballers might be willing to splurge a month’s wages to get their hands on one, even if its price tag does come at more than twice that of a Tesla Cybertruck.
When it’s switched off, the N1 looks like a stylish piece of furniture, and it unfurls within 90 seconds to become a giant, 137-inch flat screen TV.
Once unfolded, the N1 displays a stunning, incredibly bright and beautiful picture thanks to its Mini-LED smarts, and it has another fancy trick up its sleeve, being able to rotate by 180 degrees. The divisions between the folded sections of the display are invisible even when trying to spot them close up. That’s because C Seed has developed a proprietary Adaptive Gap Calibration technology that carefully measures the distance between the edges, using sensors to detect any offsets, so it can adjust the brightness of the pixels and obscure any gaps. It can achieve 4,000 nits of peak brightness, the company says, and of course it supports HDR10+, though Dolby Vision is strangely absent.
The audio system packs a lethal punch too, with a pair of integrated 100-watt speakers delivering crisp and clear, room-filling audio. There’s also a built-in 9.2-channel AV receiver with a dedicated subwoofer, which makes it possible to wire it up to numerous external speakers.
Strangely though, for a super luxurious TV, the C Seed N1 lacks any HDMI 2.1 ports, instead making do with HDMI 2.0. So millionaire hardcore gamers may be less than enthralled, despite the stunning concept.
The C Seed N1 is, without doubt, the crème de la crème of AV luxury, not surprisingly it will set you back at least £229,000 if you decide to make it the centerpiece of your humble mansion. However, that’s just the starting price, for the company offers a range of customisation options that can bump up the cost. These include premium materials with gloss, semi-gloss, metallic and matte finishes.
Despite the wallet-busting price tag, C Seed reckons it has sold more than 200 N1 TVs so far.
It’s notable that the N1 isn’t the first television to adopt some kind of camouflage. We’ve seen plenty of transparent TV concepts over the years, and a couple of years back LG Electronics unleashed its funky rollable OLED TV, which also hides itself away when not in use, using a different mechanism.
However, for regular consumers, the most attainable camouflaged TV is probably going to be Samsung Electronics’ considerably more modest The Frame, which doesn’t fold up or roll up at all, but instead tries to disguise itself as a work of art.
