Scuba diving and caving: not hobbies for the faint-hearted. One, plunging under water carrying a limited supply of precious compressed air on one’s back. The other, squeezing through pitch-black, narrow passageways, with just a rope to guide you back to civilisation. Now, imagine combining the two. While we might do a bit of snorkelling on holiday, it’s almost impossible to know what wonders lie deep beneath, and what it genuinely feels like to experience them.
Cave diving is one of those activities truly driven by the raw spirit of exploration, an unfiltered desire to expand our collective consciousness by learning more about our planet. A select few brave souls have dedicated their lives to diving to these hidden, nearly inaccessible worlds, and capturing these spectacular places on film for the rest of us to experience.
And today it really is possible to experience it in a more lifelike way than ever, from the comfort of our own homes. Nothing makes that clearer than watching Find Your Mission X – the new documentary from Hisense and the Discovery Channel – on Hisense’s new ULED X TV. A host of tech innovations put you in the fins of diver and photographer Ping Fan as he explores the undersea depths of caverns off Mexico. Here’s why the ULED X is a passport to new worlds:
Trip the light fantastic
Traditionally, choosing the right screen has been an unwinnable trade-off. The choice was either an expensive OLED screen, with its greater colour accuracy and picture clarity owing to each pixel producing its own light; or going with a more affordable traditional LCD display, which illuminates the entire screen with one backlight, making images brighter but less accurate.
But now there’s no need to choose, with Hisense’s Mini-LED X technology proving the best of both worlds, taking a traditional backlit screen, but splitting the light into a staggering 20,000 independent LEDs, which in turn illuminate 5,000 local dimming zones. In addition, quantum dot technology means the TV can display well over a billion colour combinations.
Those are all big numbers, but in essence, it means that the TV only illuminates different areas when it needs to – ensuring that murky depths remain murky, that sunlight is piercing, and that the colours on-screen really pop.
No faking, just making
There was a time when we first started upgrading to high-definition that our TVs thought they knew better than we did. By default, most sets would enable “motion smoothing”, which is a bit like an Instagram filter that tries to turn the 24 frames a second of a typical film into a buttery smooth experience. Though this can be nice for, say, watching a football match, when it comes to serious films and documentaries, it risks making movement appear unnatural or locations on screen appear artificial.
That’s why in recent years there has been a pushback, led by none other than Tom Cruise, so that some new TVs, including the ULED X, come with “filmmaker mode”. This is a setting that tells the TV to limit the “post-processing” it performs on pictures, so that once you have enabled it, you can be confident that you’re seeing the caverns off Mexico exactly as the director did as he paddled through subterranean air pockets.
Play it by ear
Sound is what truly immerses us in other worlds. As your ears carefully attune to every drip of water that falls from the cave ceiling, the crackle of soil or creak of rocks beneath the explorers’ feet, you realise that despite its sleekness, the ULED X packs a punch in the sound department.
The designers have somehow managed to pack in seven speakers, including a rear bass subwoofer – far more than the traditional left-and-right stereo speakers, to create a rich surround experience, without the need to turn your living room into something that resembles the Abbey Road Studios.
And if you are that sort of audiophile? Then the ULED X has full support for the latest Dolby Atmos technology, which means you can tune your home cinema to be the perfect screening room.
So, grab your oxygen tank and flippers (OK, just your remote control will do) and dive into a whole new experience.
Go behind the scenes of the spectacular new documentary from Hisense and Discovery on YouTube. Choose technology with the power to change the way you experience the world: visit Hisense
