We were banned, along with the rest of the media, from the Samsung Display booth at MWC, as the company has for several years, following the leaking of some information several years ago which made the firm paranoid about showing things. However, according to the Korea Herald, someone has been leaking information about what was shown.
Although Samsung Display has previously shown AMOLEDs with 800ppi (Samsung Display Raises the Contrast Bar) (which is about the same as the Sony UHD smartphones), the company was reported to have shown displays with 1,200ppi at MWC and to have said that it is aiming to get to 1500ppi eventually for VR applications.
As well as the high resolution, Samsung is said to have shown force touch, an OLED without a polariser and an OLED without blue (apparently for colour blind viewers and a bizarre concept as it was explained).
The Herald said that the firm didn’t show foldable devices, generally, but did show these to a small number of handset suppliers.
Analyst Comment
It’s great to see this envelope being further pushed – personally I am offended by all the VR headsets I have seen with the ‘screen door effect’. Last summer, we ran a story about Sunic Systems (Sunic Systems Enables 2,250 PPI AMOLEDs and FMM OLED TVs) which had said at IMID 2016 that it had a process to develop displays up to 2250ppi based on FMM patterning. Of course, that is just the OLED deposition, rather than the substrate and transistor array, which would still need a lot of work.
Force touch would be an interesting innovation and removing the polariser could save power or improve brightness.
Of course, as we have discussed recently, having the display is one thing, but you also have to be able to drive it fast enough for VR and that would remain a challenge at the 90Hz or more needed for VR with UltraHD or higher resolution. (BR)
Sunic showed in this paper how it can create high ppi OLEDs
