Super AMOLED: introduction and market status - Page 18

Toshiba Mobile Display developed a 7" LTPS TFT LCD panel that has an integrated in-cell touch panel. The new LCD is only 1mm thick (about 57% thinner than a LCD with an external touch panel) and weights only 225 grams (48% less than an external-touch LCD). The integrated touch panel also reduces the surface reflection ratio by about 10%. This is basically the same technology that Samsung uses in their Super AMOLED displays.

We don't know when TMDisplay plans to actually produce such panels. They will show this technology next month at SID 2011.

Here's a nice video showing Samsung's Super AMOLED display under a 100X microscope (the device is a Samsung Focus phone):

You can see that this display uses a PenTile subpixel matrix (in which the (smaller) green subpixel is shared between two pixels). Samsung's upcoming Super AMOLED Plus no longer uses a PenTile.

Here's a nice video showing LG's new NOVA LCD display side by side with a Super AMOLED (a Galaxy S phone) and Apple's iPhone 4 Retina Display (which is also an LCD). LG says that the NOVA displays are 50% brighter than the LCD and will consume about half the power than an AMOLED display on a white screen.

Samsung released a short video showing the difference between an IPS-LCD (as used in Apple's iPhone 4), a Super AMOLED and the new Super AMOLED Plus:

Super AMOLED Plus displays are an upgrade to Super AMOLED. They use a real-stripe subpixel matrix and not pentile - and so has 50% more sub-pixels. The PPI is a bit larger but Samsung will soon make them at much higher resolutions. Super AMOLED Plus displays are also thinner, brighter and use 18% less energy than the older Super AMOLED displays.

We've got a lot of Super AMOLED Plus news today. Here's a short video comparing the Galaxy S2 (with its 4.3" Super AMOLED Plus display) to a Galaxy S (4" Super AMOLED) and an iPhone 4 (3.5" IPS-LCD). The most apparent thing about the S2 - it's a big phone...

Update: We have some new information about Samsung's AMOLED manufacturing process. It turns out that they plan to soon move to a laser-based method (LITI) from the currently-used shadow-mask method (FMM). This will allows them to achieve 300ppi or more...

Earlier today we posted about the Super AMOLED plus resolution - and now we got our answer. It turns out that my calculations about the pentile matrix were incorrect - it fact it uses 2 sub-pixels for each pixel while a 'real' RGB matrix (or Real-Stripe as Samsung calls it) uses 3 sub-pixels for each pixels - and here's your 50% increase. Here's Samsung's own image showing the difference:

It also turns out that a Real-Stripe matrix also takes up more space per pixel. This explains why a 4.3" display that uses Real-Stripe has the same resolution as a 4" with a penTile matrix. But this display should actually be clearer because of the added sub-pixels and better matrix design.

Update: We now got the answer to this little mystery, you can read it here.

Samsung's new Galaxy S2 phone has a Super AMOLED Plus display but something is strange about the resolution of this phone. It's a 4.3" panel with 800x480 resolution (WVGA). That's the same resolution found on the original Galaxy S that has a 4" Super-AMOLED. When Samsung announced the Super AMOLED Plus they said that it offers 50% more sub-pixels and offers over 300ppi.

The original Super AMOLED used Samsung's PenTile Matrix scheme (shown above on the right) - which uses a shared green pixel (RGBG). The Super AMOLED Plus displays uses a regular RGB matrix (shown above on the left). That means that you need more subpixels to show the same amount of pixels - indeed a pentile matrix uses 33% less pixels (for example a 4X4 RGB display will use 48 subpixels while a 4X4 RGBG pentile will use only 36 subpixels).

Samsung announced a new phone - the Galaxy SL. It's very similar to the Galaxy S in fact the only differences are an LCD display instead of the Super AMOLED and a TI OMAP 3630 processor instead of Samsung's own Hummingbird (both 1Ghz processors).

We're not really worried here - we know that Samsung still has AMOLED supply issues (even the Nexus S is shipping with LCD in some countries) - and we know that the new flagship phone (the Galaxy S2?) will have a Super AMOLED Plus displays...

Samsung reported strong financial results, with over 80 million mobile devices shipped in the fourth quarter of 2010. In their financial report, Samsung also confirms they will ship a new phone that will be the Galaxy S successor during the first half of 2011, and this device will have a dual-core processor and a Super AMOLED Plus display. This will probably be the Galaxy S2, leaked a few weeks ago.

With regards to tablets, Samsung says that they have sold over 2 million Galaxy Tab devices in three months, and they plan to release a 'number of versions' in 2011. Will some of these use an OLED display?

Update: The Galaxy Tab 2 is now official, here's more details along with the new Galaxy S2 phone.

Update: We understand that Samsung wants to introduce the Galaxy Tab 2 soon, and it's not clear whether they'll be able to actually deliver 7" Super-AMOLED displays in time - some say that it will use an LCD like the original Tab. It's not clear also whether this video is real or is this a fake...

We found a "leaked" video announcing the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Tab 2. The leaked specs include a 7" 2048x1200 Super-AMOLED display (which is probably a Super AMOLED Plus, really, because of that resolution). Samsung unveiled a 7" Super-AMOLED in a tablet prototype back in November 2010, so this isn't a huge surprise. Here's the video: