MicroOLED 0.61-inch OLED panel has a 1280×1024 resolution, looking to find it’s way into a lucky camera’s EVF

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  • January 29, 2012 at 6:22 am

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MicroOLED 0.61-inch 5,400k dot 1280x1024 resolution OLED panel

Last year we were pretty excited with the new Sony OLED electronic viewfinder (EVF), which we tested on the Sony A65 camera, and can also be found in the Sony A77 and NEX-7.

The 0.5-inch ECX331A XGA (1024×768 RGB) 2,400k dot Sony OLED panel found in the above cameras, had at the time the highest resolution and pixel density of any commercial microdisplay. The benefit is that it provides an incredibly clear image, finally challenging optical viewfinders.

We’ve been championing electronic viewfinders as the future replacement to optical viewfinders in cameras, for some time now, because they offer certain clear advantages. First of all you can do away with the typical reflex mirror used to reflect part of the oncoming light from your lens to the pentaprism in optical viewfinders; as a result, you get more light onto your sensor and a more compact camera – see mirrorless cameras.

An EVF can also be more informative and customizable, with overlay information, and because you are effectively always looking at what the camera CMOS sensor is seeing, you have an exact live preview of what you will be shooting when you press the shutter button.

Until recently however, EVFs generally sucked, you had a pixelated image with a lot of lag and usually bad color reproduction and poor contrast.
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Sony starts selling its ‘magical’ OLED panels, coming to a camera EVF or head-mounted display near you — hopefully

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  • November 4, 2011 at 12:42 pm

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Sony OLED panels ECX331A and ECX332A

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.
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