SCHOTT Debuts New Ceramic Cooktop Glass That Can Double as Full Color Video Display

Tired of boring black-glass cooktops?

How about a cooktop that provides video cooking guides, color images, and more? That’s the idea behind SCHOTT’s new CERAN Luminoir TFT (thin film transistor) display.

At last week’s IFA conference in Germany, SCHOTT announced a new TFT display technology that enabled a full-color touch screen to display high-fidelity video and images. This is a big deal for cooktop manufacturers, who, alongside their customers, typically embrace the sleek black aesthetics of glass-ceramic surfaces. However, using any integrated display would normally mean sacrificing the dark black display associated with high-end ceramic cooktops, as black glass tends to absorb light, making display integration challenging.

However, SCHOTT says they solved this issue by optimizing light and color transmission through the glass-ceramic substrate, enabling the integration of high-resolution TFT displays while maintaining a deep black appearance when the display is off. This allows for the “dead front” effect, which keeps the cooking surface looking clean and like a typical high-end cooktop when not in use, but enabling a multicolor display when activated.

You can see the SCHOTT CERAN Luminoir TFT on display in the video below:

Could this mean the cooktop surface itself has entered that chat as the preferred video display in the kitchen? Maybe, but it’s early. Over the past decade, various appliance and system manufacturers have jockeyed to position their preferred platform as the primary video display of choice in the kitchen. There was Amazon with its digital assistants, GE Appliances with its video-enabled built-in microwave oven, and Samsung pushing its Family Hub fridge with its large digital displays in the door. However, no one has really pushed the cooktop, mostly because the dark-black ceramic surfaces did not make for very good digital displays.

At least until now. We’ll keep an eye on this space to see if any cooktop makers move to integrate this technology and push their ceramic cooktops to become multimedia hubs. At the very least, expect some appliance brands to use this technology to offer visually rich touch-screen user interfaces, and most likely some of these will be on display by this time next year at IFA.

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