display technology | Stuff-Review

Display shootout: HTC One X vs. Galaxy Nexus (vs. iPad 3) screen comparison

April 18, 2012 at 6:02 pm

The two hottest Android smartphones right now are the new 4.7-inch HTC One X and the incumbent 4.65-inch Galaxy Nexus that we have reviewed in-depth here. A key hardware distinction between the two is the use of different display technologies. Both have a 720p resolution, but the Samsung Galaxy Nexus features a PenTile Matrix Super AMOLED display while the HTC One X has a standard RGB Super IPS LCD2 screen. You can read more about the differences between Samsung’s PenTile Matrix technology and standard RGB here.

Now, we can easily argue that the display is probably the single most important hardware feature of any mobile device so we’ll be taking an in-depth look between the two Android smartphones. We also have a 3rd generation iPad handy with its amazingly sharp and most importantly color accurate display, so we’ll occasionally be throwing it in our comparison for good measure.
continue reading

Sharp expanding production of first IGZO LCD panels, too late for the iPad 3 but in time for a 7-inch iPad?

News

April 14, 2012 at 5:27 am

Sharp has just announced that it’s ramping up production of the world’s first LCD panels using advanced indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) semiconductors at its Kameyama Plant No. 2 in order to meet increased demand. Production of the panels began in March 2012 and the IGZO technology allows Sharp to produce LCDs with high pixel density but lower energy consumption because of the smaller thin-film transistors and increased pixel transparency.

Sharp was long rumored as an Apple partner providing the retina displays in the 3rd generation iPad. However as the IGZO technology was too young, the company couldn’t yet mass-produce the 10-inch 2048×1536 panels required for the new iPad. Apple finally went with the same IPS LCD amorphous silicon panel technology as in the iPad 2, but the new iPad retina panel now consumes 2.5-times the power at the same brightness. To compensate Apple has loaded the new iPad with almost double the amount of battery, meaning that it takes much longer to recharge the iPad 3, and it’s also slightly thicker and heavier.
continue reading

Samsung is ready to mass produce flexible, unbreakable and lighter AMOLED displays called YOUM

News

April 8, 2012 at 4:57 am

Most display panels are sandwiched between layers of glass making them rigid and also pretty breakable. Samsung Display has just filed a patent application for a new flexible AMOLED display technology, called “Youm”, that does away with the glass layers, replacing them with a special plastic film. The result is a flexible display, which can even be rolled up or folded, that according to Samsung is unbreakable and lighter than conventional displays.

You can see a comparison between the Samsung YOUM AMOLED panel technology and standard LCD and OLED panels below.
continue reading

Corning takes glass into the future with ‘A Day Made of Glass’ video

News

February 4, 2012 at 6:43 am

For a company that deals exclusively with glass (and ceramics) these are exciting times. Corning’s Gorilla Glass has already found its way into hundreds of devices, like smartphones and tablets, while we’ve already seen the announcement of the improved Gorilla Glass 2 earlier this year.

Corning doesn’t just stop at fortified glass however and the company has released a new video of how it envisions glass may come into our lives in the future. Obviously all this is very conceptual at the moment, including electrochomic glass that can change in color and translucency, big architectural display glass that is touch sensitive, automotive glass and of course tablet display glass that can even have anti-microbial properties for use in medical facilities.

The full video is after the break for your enjoyment.
continue reading

Sony starts selling its ‘magical’ OLED panels, coming to a camera EVF or head-mounted display near you — hopefully

News

November 4, 2011 at 12:42 pm

Sony has just reminded us of its recent accomplishments in organic EL display technology and, well, just how awesome its duo of small OLED displays is. Sony had announced its pair of high resolution OLED panels back in late August, which have since found their way into the company’s latest digital cameras and 3D head mounted display.

First you have the 0.5-inch ECX331A XGA (1024×768) panel, which has taken its place in electronic viewfinders (EVFs) and is one of the major selling points of the Sony A77 and A65 DSLT cameras and the NEX-7 mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera. The slightly larger, 0.7-inch ECX322A 720p HD (1280×720) can be found in the equally exciting Sony HMZ-T1 OLED 3D head-mounted display.

What’s so special about these OLED panels? Well, they offer a wide color gamut (90% of NTSC), high 10,000:1 contrast ratio, and fast 0.01ms response time, with 200 cd/m2 brightness. More importantly they pack an insane amount of pixels in a small area.

To put things into perspective, the 0.5″ ECX331A with a resolution of 1024×768 (RGB) has a pixel pitch of just 9.9μm. In comparison, the iPhone 4S with a 3.5″ 960×640 resolution retina display has a pixel pitch of 77.1μm. In layman terms, pixel pitch measures the size of a pixel; the smaller it is the harder it will be for your eyes to distinguish between them and the sharper and more lifelike the image. That means that each individual pixel (made up of three subpixels, Red, Green and Blue) on Sony’s OLED panel is almost 8 times smaller than that of the iPhone 4S display. This makes them ideal for applications where you need a compact design and you would put your eyes very close to the display, such as EVFs and head-mounted displays.
continue reading

Galaxy Nexus AMOLED HD display uses PenTile Matrix technology, no biggie

News

October 21, 2011 at 1:15 pm

We quickly covered this issue when we originally reported on Samsung’s new Super AMOLED HD display technology back in August, way before the Galaxy Nexus was announced. All current smartphone HD (over 1280×720 resolution) AMOLED displays that Samsung is producing use PentTile Matrix technology. The displays can be found in Samsung’s just announced, Android 4.0 bearing, Galaxy Nexus and the 5.3-inch mammoth Galaxy Note.

So what’s the big deal you might ask, well display purists will tell you that PenTile technology is sort of Samsung’s way of cheating into getting a higher resolution display, overcoming current AMOLED manufacturing limitations of packing ‘subpixels’ more densely.

In standard RGB flat panel screens, each pixel is made of three subpixels, one for each color, Red, Green and Blue. Samsung’s PenTile screens have only two subpixels per pixel, and instead ‘borrow’ subpixels from neighboring pixels to ‘mix’ the right color. This leads to a blurring of sharp edges, while white blocks may get a tint at the edges. The higher pixel density a PenTile display has, the less profound these effects would be.
continue reading