Pentile OLEDs: introduction and market status - Page 5

A few days ago we posted about DisplayMate's Nexus-One display tests. Basically they are very unhappy with the OLED's performance, especially when compared to the iPhone's LCD.

Now Barry Young from the OLED-Association has sent us his response to these tests:

Last week, there was an incredible amount of Internet chatter, generated by one well-regarded tester (DisplayMate) and one blogger (DisplayBlog) comparing the AMOLED display in the Nexus I with the LTPS LCD in the iPhone. In short, according to the tester, the AMOLED didn’t measure up. The evaluation was, to my knowledge, the first in-depth scientific comparison of the two displays. Did they help or just confuse the situation? There was a time when display architectures and the measurements of performance were relatively simple:

The DisplayBlog and DisplayMate are working on an interesting series of tests for Google's Nexus One phone AMOLED display and the iPhone's 3GS display. It's not finished yet, but they have posted the first tests of the AMOLED display. There's a lot of technical information, but here are the main conclusions:

• The OLED is 800x480, but uses PenTile technology, that has two-thirds of the total number of sub-pixels found on an 800x480 LCD, so it won’t be quite as sharp as a typical 800x480 display.
• The display has only 16-bits color depth, with just 32 or 64 intensity levels. DisplayMate say this is unacceptable for a high performance phone such as the Nexus One. The colors are coarse and inaccurate as a result. 
• The display is excellent for text, icons and menu graphics, but poor for image and awful for resolution scaling. The problem with resolution scaling lies in the Android OS which uses a "laughably primitive scaling algorithm".
• The peak white brightness is just 229 cd/m2 which is rather poor.
• The black brightness is outstanding (0.0035 cd/m2) - so dark it is hard to measure or even detect.
• The contrast ratio (65416) is great, the highest they have measured for a production display.
• The screen reflectance is relatively high and washes out the image, makes it hard to view in bright conditions. 
• The phone uses Dynamic Color and Dynamic Contrast which results is exaggerated colors and stretching of images.

Samsung SDI this week will announce its intention to produce the world's first 3-inch WVGA (480 x 800) active-matrix (AM) OLED panel, using PenTile subpixel rendering technology from Clairvoyante Inc. PenTile technology makes it possible to attain WVGA performance by eliminating one-third of the subpixels while maintaining the same display resolution.

Anticipating a strong demand for OLED technology, Samsung recently invested in additional capacity. Industry research group Display Search predicts that the AM OLED market will grow to $5.58 billion by 2011, up from $220.5 million in 2007. Samsung has been fabricating OLED panels since August 2002 for applications in car audio systems, electronic games, MP3 players and, now, cell phones.