Samsung Will Produce 4K 800 ppi OLED Display

Megalith

Megalith

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Samsung Display is gearing up to produce 7th-generation OLED panels soon. In order to stay on top of the competition, the company is diversifying its portfolio with foldable OLED, chip-on-plastic OLED, and a high-resolution OLED that will reportedly flaunt an incredibly packed 800 ppi. I cannot wait to see the battery life on that guy.

This kind of pixel density isn't for TV screens or tablets, but rather smaller devices, like phones. A 5.5" display with 3840x2160 Ultra HD "4K" resolution would have exactly 801ppi pixel density, for instance, and it's not the first time Samsung is rumored to be perfecting such a 4K screen. Samsung was said to equip the S8 with those, but it went the route of Infinity Display, and we can't say that we are disappointed with the result. The Note 8 is rumored to arrive with a 4K panel, but if it is indeed a 6.4" one, as speculated, and Samsung wants to keep its new 18.5:9 ratio, the phablet might score a 4428 x 2160 resolution, with the on-screen buttons strip occupying a hundred pixels or so at the bottom.
 
This crazy quest for super high resolution but super small panels is - at least to me - a waste of technology but whatever, just means more power used even with OLED technology than really necessary. Hell I'm happy with 1920x1080 panels in my portable devices, never saw a need for anything more and the battery savings are quite substantial in comparison to the higher ones.

I'm still irritated at the whole "4K" thing anyway and wish I could find the idiot that started spewing it to smack some sense into the person. We've used vertical as the defining term for progressive video format resolutions but now because "bigger is better" the industry has shifted to using the horizontal resolution. Damned if I'm gonna call a 2160 pixel tall display "4K" like it or not. :D
 
A step in the *wrong* direction for phone users, but a nod to the increasing necessity of high pixel density for VR applications (for which these phones are, no doubt, being groomed).......I smell Vive/OR's next gen panels in the making here.......or at least a similar tech, this is what we could expect to see in a VR helmet revision in 2018 or 2019, even if we're scaling its the pixel density that comes into play here.
 
As HeadRusch said, this will be important for VR. It'll make for a large increase in picture quality and drive adoption.
 
tunatime said:
Does vr even need 800 ppi?
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Yeah, VR is probably at the top of the list of devices that would benefit most. Any device you have that close to your eyeballs, PPI matters. It's just that 4 hour battery life you're gonna have to get used-to again.....:(
 
Tiberian said:
This crazy quest for super high resolution but super small panels is - at least to me - a waste of technology but whatever, just means more power used even with OLED technology than really necessary. Hell I'm happy with 1920x1080 panels in my portable devices, never saw a need for anything more and the battery savings are quite substantial in comparison to the higher ones.
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Samsung gives you the choice to run your phones in lower resolution, you can down scale the res on the s8 to 720p/1080p is your want. So enough with the complaining that 4k isn't needed.
 
I guess one advantage with the super high res screens is that you probably won't be able to see the occasional bad pixel.
 
gxp500 said:
Samsung gives you the choice to run your phones in lower resolution, you can down scale the res on the s8 to 720p/1080p is your want. So enough with the complaining that 4k isn't needed.
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What you're displaying does not = what you're driving. The screen still has to be powered, it still has that many pixels, it still drains more battery even if you set it to 240p, end of discussion.
 
nutzo said:
I guess one advantage with the super high res screens is that you probably won't be able to see the occasional bad pixel.
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Neither will you if you have a pixel perfect screen of a lower resolution.

Tiberian said:
This crazy quest for super high resolution but super small panels is - at least to me - a waste of technology but whatever, just means more power used even with OLED technology than really necessary. Hell I'm happy with 1920x1080 panels in my portable devices, never saw a need for anything more and the battery savings are quite substantial in comparison to the higher ones.

I'm still irritated at the whole "4K" thing anyway and wish I could find the idiot that started spewing it to smack some sense into the person. We've used vertical as the defining term for progressive video format resolutions but now because "bigger is better" the industry has shifted to using the horizontal resolution. Damned if I'm gonna call a 2160 pixel tall display "4K" like it or not. :D
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A side effect of an extremely competitve android market: specification wars, and how to make numbers look bigger.

Camera sensor megapixels was one such victim, now it's phone screen resolutions. I bought a 1080p Snapdragon 821 phone as soon as I saw one because everyone else who used 820 at the time were ALL 1440p screen, my phone pretty much came closest to a perfectly specced phone.
 
4096 x 2160 would be 2048 x 2160 per eye. That would be awesome for VR. Useless for phones.
 
Vercinaigh said:
What you're displaying does not = what you're driving. The screen still has to be powered, it still has that many pixels, it still drains more battery even if you set it to 240p, end of discussion.
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Yes end of discussion, go back to your moto startac with a 7 digit readout for maximum battery life...
 
gxp500 said:
Samsung gives you the choice to run your phones in lower resolution, you can down scale the res on the s8 to 720p/1080p is your want. So enough with the complaining that 4k isn't needed.
Click to expand...


What "most" people want is lower power usage for longer battery life (the main point of the comment you quoted).... High resolution screens is going to have a higher power usage than a lower resolution screen. Lowering the resolution on a higher resolution screen does NOT lower power usage of that screen (in normal usage). You have to power all the pixels the screen has and it's independent of what resolution the gpu is outputting. (Something about display scaling is the issue here.)

Anyone with an Galaxy S7 that has the Android 7.0 update (same feature as the S8) can tell you, resolution changes doesn't affect battery life (if does, it's only by minutes with my usage).

Now, with the oled/amoled tech, it "could be possible" to lower power usage of a high res panel IF it was only actually using 720p/1080p worth of pixels of it's 1440p screen.... Since (in theory) only the active section of the screen being used or at least light from said area.

But then you wont be getting full screen size of that phone screen (5.6 inch screen for the quoted S8), it'll be smaller. Like 3 to 4.5 inches depending on resolution (no hard math, just guessing) of usable screen with the rest of the screen being dark and looking like it has a huge boarder around the active section of the screen. (still probably wouldn't be as power efficient as a native 720p/1080p screen of the same tech but unlike other screens, .)

But because of display scaling making a lower resolution filing up the entire screen (the way people prefer it), no power saving happens here.


Now dont get me wrong, these 4k screens will be nice for VR where (as of the moment) battery life isn't an issue and the screen is a few inches away from your face.... But on phones, between battery life and distance between the screen and your eyes (12 inches or more ), 4k screens make little sense. Especially when most people have a hard time telling the difference between 1080p and 1440p resolution on screen less than 6 inches. Now I can sort of tell but it's subtleand isn't worth the trade off for extra (noticeable) battery life.
 
If I can use the Note 8 for VR on my desktop computer, we might be talking about some serious business. 8GiB of RAM, 4K display with dynamic resolution to save battery on phone usage. Of course... it must be compatible with LineageOS.
 
gxp500 said:
Yes end of discussion, go back to your moto startac with a 7 digit readout for maximum battery life...
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Actually have a G4 and plan to get a new LG here soon but nice try being cute. Nothing nonfactual about what i said nor did I say anything about being a bad thing or not. Way to show your ass.
 
I have pretty low expectations for my phone. Calls, texts, podcasts, decent battery and I'm happy.
 
warmon6 said:
Lowering the resolution on a higher resolution screen does NOT lower power usage of that screen (in normal usage).
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Either you, or Samsung, the world's largest manufacturer of LCDs, is wrong, as Samsung was bragging about multi-resolution power savings on their future 4K stuff from an article a while back. On OLEDs, black pixels and subpixels don't use any power at all, so my guess is that they simply turn off some of the pixels in between pixels (effectively lowering the resolution) in order to reduce power requirements, along with the GPU having to render less pixels.

When the pixel density is this high, you probably can't see the screen door effect that this might otherwise generate, and the GPU can treat four-pixel blocks like one pixel for reduced calculations. Why bother? Well, when you want the higher resolution or higher brightness, the added pixels can come alive and make for a more vibrant bright display and for VR have virtually eliminated screen door effect and make for a very crisp experience. If it has eye-tracking at some point in the future, then it could also apply this trickery to create a higher resolution just where you are looking.

The thing is, flagship smartphones are becoming "do everything" devices, and if you just want a low resolution low processor count basic phone with a huge battery that isn't meant for games and just basic phone calls and texting, that niche is very well filled as well, its just not going to be their "spec sheet oolala" bragging rights halo product.
 
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