OLED in sunlight - Page 4

Samsung Mobile Display announced that they will begin to produce AMOLED panels with integrated touch function. They will begin to produce the first panel, a 3.3" WVGA, 480x800 one in March. Samsung brands these display Super-AMOLED.

Samsung makes Super AMOLEDs by layering a touch-sensor (on-cell) over the OLED display and evaporating it. The thickness of the touch sensor is just 0.001mm - which should allow the screen to provide better images than normal AMOLEDs with an external touch layer, especially under direct light.

The old OLED-in-sunlight saga continues. After hearing that the Omnia II is better than the Nokia N900, we get an interesting comparison between Google's Nexus One (3.7" AMOLED) and Motorola's Droid (3.7" TFT LCD). It's a long (and shaky) video, but here's the summary:

• The AMOLED is brighter than the Droid, and behaves better at Sunlight


• In normal conditions, the Nexus one has much more vivid colors. When viewing photos or videos, the AMOLED has much better colors.


• The reviewer complains that he 'sees individual pixels' on the AMOLED - and this does not happen on the LCD (I'm not sure what he means). He says that sometimes the LCD's image is more 'crisp'.


• Overall the AMOLED is much better than the LCD.

UPDATE: This video has been removed from YouTube

Yesterday we posted a video comparing the Samsung Omnia II's OLED vs the Nokia N900's LCD (and the OLED is much better, of course). Now the same user has uploaded another video, showing how the displays behave in direct sunlight - and the OLED is much better. This is interesting, as usually people say that OLED are very bad in such conditions. A couple of months ago we posted a story on this - showing examples of OLEDs in sunlight that are completely non-readable. Barry Young from the OLED association told us that newer OLED displays will be much brighter - perhaps he was right.

When the Zune HD launched, there was an interesting blog post on the Apple-Insider site. They wanted to 'smash' five myths on the Zune HD, and one of the Myths is about the OLED display. They claim that OLEDs consumer more power than LCDs, are less bright, do not last long and are bad in direct sunlight. Barry Young from the OLED Association has responsed in his own blog post - basically saying that OLEDs look better, have even longer lifetime than most LCDs and consume less power.

Barry also says that when Steve Jobs first saw an OLED display, he said that's the best looking display he had ever seen. We're all waiting for Apple's first OLED product...

The only truth in the Apple-Insider article is probably about the sunlight visibility. We have discussed this issue before, and Zune HD users are indeed complaining.

The Zune HD has actually got great reviews, and it was sold-out within days of its launch. Some consider it as the first real competitor for the iPod touch, and most people love the OLED display. The Zune HD costs 290$ for the 32Gb version, and 219$ for the 16Gb.

CrunchGear reports that the Zune HD is not readable in sunlight... and they have a picture showing how bad it is:

Just a couple of weeks ago we posted about direct-light issues with OLEDs. Even though we hear that the new OLED displays are better than older ones, they still appears to be very problematic in sunlight...

OLED is an emissive display technology - which means that it emits its own light, in contrast to a reflective display - which uses an external light source - an ePaper display for example, or an LCD which is a display that blocks light from a backlight unit.

OLEDs are bright, and provide great image quality, and as of 2021, these displays perform very well under direct sunlight.

But this was not always the case. In early AMOLED displays, sunlight readability was very poor. The 2008 Nokia N85 for example, one of the first products with AMOLED displays, behaved very poorly in direct sunlight, as can be seen in the image below:

The problem in early AMOLED displays resulted from reflectance from metal electrodes in addition to relatively low brightness. Display makers however, soon upgraded their OLED displays to increase performance. Helped by new technologies and materials, OLED displays quickly overcame the sunlight readability problem. Today OLED displays actually perform better than the best LCDs in direct sunlight.

For more information on OLED display technology click here.