LG.Philips LCD (LPL) announced yesterday it has developed the industry’s fastest TFT-LCD panel for mobile phones, which will permit next-generation handsets to display TV and video content with less motion blur.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of HDTV Retailer and
Mobile Display Report

The new 2-inch panel has a 16ms response time. "Most of the TFT-LCD panels used in phones today have response times of 25ms, causing afterimages and ghosting, which reduce the picture quality for high-definition video," said an LPL press release. "However," it continued, "the high speed response LCD panel developed by LG.Philips LCD shows videos clearly and without any afterimages."

To create high-speed displays that meet the low power consumption requirements of mobile phones, LG.Philips LCD developed different technology than is used in its large-area panels. This new product boasts a response time similar to LCD panels for notebook computers and is also easy to mass produce.

Hyun He Ha, LPL’s VP and head of the Small and Medium Displays Business Unit, said, "This product breaks the 20ms response time barrier, which was thought to be the limit for mobile phone TFT-LCD panels. As the first such TFT-LCD product with a response time in the teens, we will be able to fill demand in the mobile display market for displays that can display high-resolution video and consume little power. We plan to start mass producing these panels this year." The statement did not indicate how the new display would consume less power than competing panels, and did not supply figures to document the claim. No information on pricing was given.

The two display characteristics - fast response time and low power consumption with TV and video imagery - that LPL highlighted in its announcement, are possessed in far greater degree by active-matrix OLED displays, production of which is just being ramped up now by LPL’s arch-rival Samsung SDI. (AMOLED has a response time measured in microseconds.) SDI and corporate sibling Samsung Electronics are developing AMOLED displays aggressively, while LPL executives made comments at the IMID/IDMC conference in Daegu, Korea last month indicating they lacked confidence in the technology.

But in the short run, AMOLEDs will be manufactured in quantities that are modest in terms of the billion-units-a-year cell-phone industry, and they will be significantly more expensive than TFT-LCDs.

Another point. Display human factors specialists - along with the rest of us - know that small displays can have poorer specifications than large ones and still deliver images that are pleasing to the human eye, but there’s been very little research to quantify that. When it comes to large-screen LCD-TVs, we pretty much know how good is good enough. With small LCD-TVs, we don’t.

On a 17-inch LCD monitor, 16ms produces significantly less motion blur than 25ms does. Can the same be said for a 2-inch cell-phone display? Obviously, LPL thinks so. When we see the side-by-side comparisons, we’ll certainly share the results with you.