Samsung have announced the new super high-resolution display, the PenTile RGBW™ panel, for next generation tablets and smart phones.This new 10″ panel is capable of displaying 2560 x 1600 WQXGA pixel resolution. The display will be on show at the SID Display Week 2011 International Symposium May 17-19 in LA.. Be ready, these next generation panels will make you go WOW.
The rise of the Tablet has only just begun. In the past much of the technology used in the tablets was cannibalized from PC and Mobile Phone parts bins. The iPad 2 signaled the change, new designs and technology developed specifically for tablets. The iPads Retina display is a very nice panel – high colour IPS panel – but it has some serious limitations, low resolution with only 132dpi – dots per inch – the iPad 2 is a standard resolution display when compared to a standard desktop monitor. Most desktop monitors available today have a of between 72 and 96 dpi, most will have a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and sizes between 20 and 24″. The Samsung displays 300 dpi is off the charts for a 10″ panel. The iPhone 4’s display is manufactured by LG with a resolution of 326dpi – 960 x 640 at 3.5″ in size -but that is much smaller than a tablet panel.
The new Samsung panel was co-developed with Nouvoyance using their PenTile RGBW™ technology. The RGBW in the title refers to the different way this panel lays out the sub-pixel colours,. Similar to art class the display can mix up any colour from red, green, blue and white sub pixels, there are 4 sub pixels to each displayed pixel. The PenTile display uses a different arrangement of the Red, Green, Blue and White sub-pixels. So through some sub pixel trickery the PenTile panel is able to squeeze super high res into a little panel while using only half as much as traditional panels.
A WQXGA (Wide Quad eXtended Graphics Array) panel has 2560×1600 pixels on display. Once you cram that many pixels into a 10.1″ space you are talking super resolution displays. When it comes to super high-resolution displays the world is split into two side, for and against. Those against often deride it as unnecessary and squint, those for are always trying to cram more pixels on the screen. The people against are thinking about text size but the people for are imagining hi-res pictures with incredible detail and colour. You can always set your font size larger but you can’t increase resolution.In fact the right sized text on these new displays would be sharper and clearer than the current generation display.
LG will also have a new high-resolution panels on display at SID 2011, no specific resolutions yet but they will be showing the next generation super high-resolution Advanced-IPS panel, the next-gen iPhone display in all sizes, from 3″ right up to 55″ panels. The display industry itself is moving towards higher resolution panels, the steady march of progress, the push to HXGA – 4k HD 4096 x 3072 – is already underway with studio camera’s and cinema’s using the technology already.
From the Samsung press release. “Samsung’s PenTile display technology is the only display technology that operates at 40 percent less power yet provides twice that of Full HD-viewing performance for consumers compared to legacy RGB stripe LCDs. There is no other commercial display technology on the market today that offers this high of a resolution and pixel density in a 10.1-inch size display,” said Dr. Sungtae Shin, Senior VP of Samsung Electronics.
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PenTile RGBW WQXGA Technology Highlights
- This 10.1-inch tablet panel is capable of 300 cd/m2 of luminance, yet uses 40 percent less power than that used by legacy RGB stripe LCDs in power-saving modes.
- An outdoor brightness mode of as much as 600 cd/m2 luminance enables viewing in bright ambient lighting.The display’s color gamut is 72 percent., allowing greater color realism than legacy RGB stripe tablet displays that have a typical color gamut of 55 percent NTSC.
- PenTile technology achieves 300 dpi resolution with two-thirds the number of subpixels, maintaining the VESA/ICDM display resolution standard.
Samsung will most likely make the new panels available in their tablets first, so expect the new Galaxy tablets to be sporting PenTile panels. With a little competition from LG the panel wars are starting to heat up, cheaper prices and better display panels are our rewards hopefully.
Samsung press release, PentileBlog, Nouvoyance.
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