[Digitimes] Sharp, Samsung and AUO making 4K displays to mobile phones this fall

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finrep

Weaksauce
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So Digitimes is reporting that we'll likely see 4K mobile phones this fall.

This is consistent with earlier reports. Such as this Samsung slide from last year.
samsung-display-slide-1.jpg

(Source)

My reactions:

1. Why? Totally unnecessary and stupid
2. Please go on, not because I think that we need that in mobile phones but it will be good for VR.

Honestly, the resolution race has lost all sanity a long time ago. Why would choose a 4K screen over 1080p and much longer battery life? Only idiots.

Just like this mania over 8 core SoCs makes no sense. Apple is the only company which has kept its sanity in that department. And then Samsung and company wonder why they have falling sales...

Anyway, still good for VR!
 
ffs, get working on better battery tech and not energy wasting displays with useless PPI, just because you can and the industry choose "4K" as the next, hot, must-have shit after 3D bombed.

/rant over

edit: VR is a good point 'tho
 
I'm pretty sure the battery life hit for higher resolution is negligible.

I appreciate the higher resolution and I can still see the difference between resolutions. Until I can't there isn't really a reason to stop increasing it.
 
I can't wait until the day where we have 12k phones and still battery life that can't last a day of normal use. Just think of how high the detail will be when you look at your battery meter going down!
 
4K on a 6 inch screen? LOL. Talk about the most worthless spec ever.
 
sharknice said:
I'm pretty sure the battery life hit for higher resolution is negligible.

I appreciate the higher resolution and I can still see the difference between resolutions. Until I can't there isn't really a reason to stop increasing it.
Click to expand...

It isn't, as an example see the LG G3.
 
Quix said:
It isn't, as an example see the LG G3.
Click to expand...

Indeed, you can look at that chart and pretty much inverse the trend. There, you have the battery life trend with each of these upgrades.

1080p is the absolute largest resolution I could see being needed on a phone. Maybe 1440p for utter kicks. 4k is literally just stupid.

The specs war has gotten way out of hand. They need to stop, sit down, and focus on the rest of the phone. How about improving the speakerphone? How about improving the sound? How about making the phone tougher? How about making the camera better? How about actually bringing up the friggin Wifi on these to iPhone levels? (wifi on Androids in general is terrible at understanding when it needs to let go of access points). And of course there's more. This is just the tip of the ice berg.

Most importantly, how about improving the battery life?



Nope, let's just keep adding more cores and more screen. Because people using these actually care about how many cores they have... And they can totally tell the difference between 1080p and 4k (or worse 1440p->4k) on a tiny screen. I don't understand why higher resolution and more cores would be a buzzword in the mobile market anymore, what with how stupid most consumers are. If cores and screen res mattered, iPhone would be on the bottom by a long shot. Thing is, it's about establishing a brand and a reputation for the brand. To get that, I think screens and cores are out of the window. To stand out, other things matter more now.


The mobile market is in roughly the same state as the LCD market. We keep seeing these crappy little incremental upgrades, leading to stagnation and milking... But I ranted about that elsewhere, to an extent:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1041270973&postcount=3
 
bloodypulp said:
I don't want more Pixels, I want less Bezel.
Click to expand...

You can buy the Sharp Aquos Crystal for Sprint right now.

4K screens on phones are a bit silly, but I can see why manufacturers are producing them. It's a clear spec bump and easy to sell to consumers, unlike improving a speakerphone or making a phone tougher.

Qualcomm improves the performance and efficiency of their GPUs with each new version, so driving a 4K panel with an Adreno 430 essentially becomes "free". That was the G3's issue actually - LG was in a rush to be first with a 1440p phone, so they used the Snapdragon 801/Adreno 330. The resolution pushes the 330 out of its efficiency sweet spot, reducing battery life. The Note 4 has a Snapdragon 805/Adreno 420, a similar battery size, and a 1440p screen and it tops battery charts. The Nexus 6 has a bigger screen than the G3 and a less optimized SAMOLED display than the Note 4, also lasts longer than the G3.

Battery chemistry improvements are slow and incremental. Without a breakthrough in battery technology, it's more likely that we'll only see major battery life improvements from Google and app developers. Manufacturers in every step of the supply chain are already doing what they can to improve battery life, while still differentiating the new hotness from the old and busted.

Personally, I'm waiting for Sony's Z4C to upgrade from my Nexus 5. The rumored specs buck the trend of huge screens and it should have no problems powering through a day of heavy use.
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
The mobile market is in roughly the same state as the LCD market. We keep seeing these crappy little incremental upgrades, leading to stagnation and milking... But I ranted about that elsewhere, to an extent:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1041270973&postcount=3
Click to expand...

I disagree. The LCD market is innovating rapidly. We were in stagnation a few years ago. Now we're seeing the mainstreaming of 1440p, 4K is affordable. Adaptive Sync is becomming the norm, the specter of 100+ Hz monitors is just beginning and OLED is around the corner(which of course isn't about LCD but a sign of the innovation taking place).

The mobile space is far less interesting these days. The 2011-2013 years were incredible. Virtually everything on every phone was a novelty. Anandtech had these amazing 2+ hour podcasts where they'd go in on display technology, not just because they could but also because there was a reason too, the display changes from the S2 to S4 alone necessitated that. I don't blame Anand and Brian Klug for jumping ship, they saw where the mobile race was heading and it wasn't going to get any exciting in 2014 and onwards. The opposite is true for LCDs. The early years of the 2010, and arguably even before then, were super boring. Things really started to heat up in 2013 and especially 2014 and that wave is ongoing.


Ozymandias said:
You can buy the Sharp Aquos Crystal for Sprint right now.

4K screens on phones are a bit silly, but I can see why manufacturers are producing them. It's a clear spec bump and easy to sell to consumers, unlike improving a speakerphone or making a phone tougher.

Qualcomm improves the performance and efficiency of their GPUs with each new version, so driving a 4K panel with an Adreno 430 essentially becomes "free". That was the G3's issue actually - LG was in a rush to be first with a 1440p phone, so they used the Snapdragon 801/Adreno 330. The resolution pushes the 330 out of its efficiency sweet spot, reducing battery life. The Note 4 has a Snapdragon 805/Adreno 420, a similar battery size, and a 1440p screen and it tops battery charts. The Nexus 6 has a bigger screen than the G3 and a less optimized SAMOLED display than the Note 4, also lasts longer than the G3.

Battery chemistry improvements are slow and incremental. Without a breakthrough in battery technology, it's more likely that we'll only see major battery life improvements from Google and app developers. Manufacturers in every step of the supply chain are already doing what they can to improve battery life, while still differentiating the new hotness from the old and busted.

Personally, I'm waiting for Sony's Z4C to upgrade from my Nexus 5. The rumored specs buck the trend of huge screens and it should have no problems powering through a day of heavy use.
Click to expand...


Nice post. You're right on the importance of the GPU. As the node shrinks continue and the GPU horsepower increases - for a lack of a better term - the battery penalty compared to a 1080p with an Adrena 330 diminishes. Qualcomm is going to push their Adrena 530 next year and that could probably run 4K at the same battery length.

But this still misses the point: imagine what we could do with an underclocked 430 or even a 530 that is there to maximise battery length at 1080p.

Your point about innovation is largely correct. I'm personally mystified why so little attention is being paid to things like eMMC, which has a huge effect on multi-tasking, web-browsing etc.
 
Oh boy, I cannot wait to see how ugly apps will look on a 4K display. A lot of devs haven't even bothered to update things to 1440p yet.
 
Adding more pixels is the industry's last resort when the LCD technology is completely exhausted.
 
finrep said:
I disagree. The LCD market is innovating rapidly. We were in stagnation a few years ago. Now we're seeing the mainstreaming of 1440p, 4K is affordable. Adaptive Sync is becomming the norm, the specter of 100+ Hz monitors is just beginning and OLED is around the corner(which of course isn't about LCD but a sign of the innovation taking place).
Click to expand...

Almost everything you just pointed out isn't really anything major to me. They're essentially just packing more and more pixels in the same type of technology, or cutting the panel up differently. Considering the way these are made, it's not exactly a huge achievement, or anything worth noting. It's really just a matter of course (ie "of course" the exact same technology will at least improve over time). All of the problems inherent to LCD technology is still there. High failure rate due to individual transistors making up so many pixels. Backlight bleed manufacturing issues. Imperfect blacks (except on certain panel types, which tend to be overpriced). Essentially they're merely making small incremental upgrades to the technology while charging a vastly larger sum of money. Heck, all it is, is packing these transistors into as small a space as possible... in as large a quantity as possible. Considering they can already pack 4K into those small 6 inch screens... what do you think is the current actual max pixel density monitor we could have? Well granted there will be connector bandwidth issues but... seriously. 6 inches, 4K. IPS (probably). We're sitting here being excited about how 4K desktops are affordable. In reality the only limiting factor from us having like (insert some silly number here)K displays is the fact that our connectors don't have enough bandwidth. The technology is already there. It has been there. They just need to just take that glass and cut it up a bit differently. Literally, that's it.

As I said the last remotely innovative feature that we got was G-Sync. Which, I have the RoG Swift, and it was worth it certainly.

OLED is nice (and expensive). It's definitely worth waiting for. I'm hoping we'll have some kind of paradigm shift in general. It'd be nice if some of the money spent on those incremental upgrades was put forth into real innovation. Like maybe we'd have OLED monitors out by now if some of that R&D went elsewhere, and then some new, exciting technology somewhere on the horizon... But nope, let's milk something that's established, I guess. It's easier and more profitable that way. In some way I wonder if they're in cohorts with the cable standards people.
 
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Pechendko said:
Adding more pixels is the industry's last resort when the LCD technology is completely exhausted.
Click to expand...

It's Megapixels all over again. They need a bigger number to throw at stupid consumers so they know that it's "better".

I'm ready for 4K TV's to blow over like 3D when most people realise they can't tell the difference from more than 3 feet away. Just in time for 8K, probably.
 
At least the hi-res non-4k screens that are knocking about now will become standard for entry-level phones. So not all bad.
 
Vega said:
4K on a 6 inch screen? LOL. Talk about the most worthless spec ever.
Click to expand...

Yea...

Now we'll have 4K phones that chug which is just what we need. I'd rather have a 1440p OLED screen then 4K on my smartphone.
 
The human eye cannot differentiate between 1080p and 4k on these size of screens. They must be future proofing them to sell to aliens or something.
 
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