OLED in sunlight - Page 3

AllAboutSymbian has posted an interesting interview with Damian Dinning, Nokia's Imaging Chief - talking about the upcoming N8. He says that Nokia chose an AMOLED because of the richer colors and wide viewing angles. He also says that the new AMOLED used in the N8 is 'definitely' better than previous AMOLED efforts from Nokia (like the N86 and N85). It's not known how it compares to Samsung's 'Super AMOLED'.

This is good news, as users of the n85 has been complaining about sunlight readability: saying it is totally useless in such situations.

Engadget posted an interesting preview on the Samsung Galaxy S. The most interesting bit is that they claim that Samsung will not sell Super-AMOLED displays to other companies for the next 18 months. Samsung can't meet demand as it is, so this make sense.

Engadget are very happy with the display (which is a 4" WVGA 800 X 480). It has terrific color and vibrancy. "this is one of the finest displays you can hope to
lay eyes on". Even in direct sunlight it remains usable - as long as you face it directly. If you view it from an angle, it suffers dramatically. The phone itself is impressive, but they say it's not "polished" enough.

Here's an interesting comparison, a Pixel-Qi transflective LCD technology (with a touch layer) against the Google Nexus-One AMOLED display. The Pixel-Qi behaves much better than the AMOLED display... It'll be interesting to see how it compares to the new Super-AMOLED displays.

Scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute have created a new nano-coating for glass-coated displays. They say that the new coating is completely reflection and glare free. It also makes it very scratch resistant. This can be a great solution for OLED displays in mobile phone that suffer from poor performance in the sun (although Super-AMOLED technology is a great step in that direction, too).>

Interestingly, they say that they got their insipiration from moths - which have non-reflective eyes...

QuickLogic announced the verification of their Visual Enhancement Engine (VEE) and Display Power Optimizer (DPO) technologies with OLED displays for mobile devices. These technologies enhance the viewability of displays in low-brightness or bright-ambient-light conditions by dynamically optimizing video characteristics to provide a better user experience. They also allow the brightness to be lowered and thus enhance battery life.

QuickLogic's proprietary VEE technology enhances image and video quality by optimizing the dynamic range, contrast, and color saturation of content on the display on a pixel-by-pixel basis. This provides a superior viewing experience for the user under any ambient light condition. QuickLogic's DPO technology can significantly reduce display power consumption through intelligent control of the display brightness.

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.

We've got the first video showing how the new Samsung Wave phone (with the Super-AMOLED display) behaves outdoors. It seems that the visibility is great... We're still waiting for a video that shows it besides another phone outside so that we can get a good comparison.

Talking about the Wave phone, here's a nice video of it alongside an iPhone. The viewing angle is vastly better...

Samsung has officially announced the s8500 Wave phone: with a 3.3" super AMOLED display and running the new Bada OS. The phone also has bluetooth 3.0 (another world's first). Interestingly, a few weeks ago we reported that Samsung are planning a Bluetooth 3.0 phone, which will have 'anti-reflective' and suitable for outdoor use'. So now we know that they have described the Super-AMOLED display.  

Samsung Wave s8500

Update: Samsung has offically launched this phone as the s-8500 Wave, with a 3.3" Super-AMOLED.

Samsung has a new phone, the GT-8500. It's the first phone that has Bluetooth 3.0. But that's not the most interesting bit - it has a 3.1" touch OLED that Samsung say is "anti-reflective" and thus suitable for outdoor use. It'll be interesting to see how it behaves in direct sun, and to hear what exactly makes it anti-reflective...

OLEDs has been said to have poor sunlight visibility, although newer OLEDs are reportedly better.