Imagine settling down with a takeout on your lap to watch the latest Love Island on a TV that costs more than your house. But then, if you can afford the latest C Seed TV (produced in collaboration with none other than Bugatti), your house is likely to be worth a great deal more than mine.
Whether you watch reruns of the Simpsons or the Royal Opera House Streaming Service, C Seed is the pinnacle way to present any broadcast. The Austrian-based company’s new Bugatti N1 system shows how precision-built, state-of-the-art tech has become part of normal domestic life for the hyper rich.
It all starts with a cool-looking crate-sized aluminum and carbon fiber box at the side of the room. This shiny lounge coffin measures over seven-and-a-half feet long (235cm) and a couple of feet high (65cm). It’s nicely sculpted with a curvaceous feature that its glossy salespeople will tell you is reminiscent of a Bugatti hypercar. If you’re a car enthusiast that’s the only car bit I’m afraid, so you may be tempted to stop reading now.
But even if you’re car fan, imagine pressing the remote and watching it all kick off. The system’s movements are perfectly precise, silent and ultra-smooth. The whole box tilts itself vertically to let folding micro-LED panels emerge and flatten completely while the high-quality speaker system unpacks itself.
It takes 45 seconds from pressing ‘on’ to having a 137-inch screen in front of you. If you’re not totally familiar with a 137-inch TV screen in your own home, its dimensions are 10 feet wide by a bit more than five and a half feet.
Folding micro-LED panels? Sounds a bit like your image could be broken into segments like a fabulous medieval triptyc painting from a renaissance cathedral. (Which some owners will probably have hanging on the wall next to it.) Not a bit of it. The long-standing expert TV reviewer from CNet, David Katzmaier, admits he couldn’t even see the joins at all once the image was displayed on a previous version of the N1.
That's thanks to C Seed’s unique system it calls Adaptive Gap Calibration. This automatically measures the distance between the edges of the folding panels, uses sensors to detect offsets and recalibrates the brightness of adjacent LEDs to hide the tiny slot.
The image tech itself is 4K UHD resolution with a high level of brightness of up to 1,000 nits, plus HDR and wide color gamut technology with 64 billion colors available. For TV techies, the pixel pitch is 0.7 mm and processing depth 16 bits per color. For the rest of us, it means a super smooth image with no visible individual pixel dots.
The prices aren’t quoted but top-end C Seed ultra-luxury self-folding TVs are over US$400,000, so the Bugatti gogglebox could be approaching half a million. There's a 110-inch model in this series too, which should be cheaper but probably not by much.
Back in 2017 we gasped at an earlier 262-inch C Seed TV, then the world's largest 4K widescreen, which cost over half a million dollars back then.
Other reports on C Seed have included taking the 2012 Red Dot "Best of the Best" design award for its 201-inch TV that was designed to be installed outdoors. That was the result of a collaboration with Porsche, although again there wasn’t much for car enthusiasts in the story. Anyway, it was another entertainingly extreme bit of kit that rose out of a ground recess at the touch of a remote button like something from Dr No or Iron Man. The M1 from 2021 brought things back indoors for a monstrous 165-inch Micro-LED 4K visual treat.
The company behind all these glorious billionaire playthings was founded in 2009 and it’s no surprise some of its top bods originally came from luxury Danish hi-fi brand Bang & Olufsen. C SEED is based in Vienna, Austria, and the kit is built in a precision engineering unit just outside the city. The sales seem to come from flagship showrooms in very affluent locations like Beverly Hills, Miami, London and Hong Kong.
The C Seed Bugatti N1 TV has its own hyper-glossy ‘book’ that’s a masterpiece of marketing. You can download direct from the source link below.
And the video of the TV unfurling like a monstrous robot in the corner of your luxury living room is worth watching too.
Source: C Seed
