Amoled screen, whats the big deal?

Daffodil.d

Just curious as too what amoled screen...is? Why is it, what appears to be a big selling point now?

hardCopy

Daffodil.d wrote: »

Just curious as too what amoled screen...is? Why is it, what appears to be a big selling point now?

I don't like them.

I have a HTC Desire with AMOLED. I really love the phone but not the screen.

I can hardly see a thing in any kind of sunlight, as in literally cupping my hands around the screen to take a photo.

I've also recently noticed that mine has burned in an image of the notification bar after only 13 months.

LukeS_

Basically they have a really high contrast ratio which makes the colours really 'pop', 178 degree viewing angles, low power consumption as the screen only lights which pixels are needed. Can't really think of anything else as I'm only up but I'm sure you could do a quick google and find out for yourself though. Really great screen though, compared my friends SGS2 to my iPhone 4's, and pictures etc. looked slightly better on his.

KrisW

Because there's no backlight behind the panel, an AMOLED screen is able to produce "real" black. This gives much better contrast than LCD, where "black" pixels will always let some light from the display backlight through.

The other advantage is that the display only consumes power for the pixels that are lit - a black screen with one lit pixel on it consumes very, very little power. Nokia have a demonstration app called "Sleeping Screen" that takes advantage of this to provide always-visible notifications on screen, and a nice screensaver, without flattening the battery (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE5pLjrivP8).

(Samsung or HTC could do something like this, but don't; I think it's because they produce both AMOLED and LCD versions of the same phone, and doing this on an LCD would kill the battery).

OLED has another interesting property - the pixels are relatively flexible, and don't need a hard base like an LCD does, so it is possible to make OLED displays to fit curved surfaces -- there are tech demos of "roll up" displays, but they're a long way from market..

kirving

As it happens, I had a faulty screen replaced on a Nokia N85. Being cheap, lazy, incompetent and ignorant, they replaced the OLED screen with an LCD. After lots of complaints, I got nowhere. Noone even knew what an OLED was about 2 years ago in either of the two big phone repair shops in the country.

I noticed a big drop in battery life with the clock screensaver active. URL="http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctormauri73/2931221998/"]example[/URL Also, the phone's themes were dieigned with a battery saving OLED in mind.

To create the picture you see in the link, and OLED lights up just afew pixels which make up the numbers - using very little battery.

An LCD on the other hand, lights us the intire display a bright white, using lots of battery power. The display then tries to block out all the backlight, except the pixels which make up the white numbers. However, this means there is a toss up between having bright numbers, or a very black display. The results is a dark grey background and not very bright numbers.

The iPhone for example used an LCD display, albeit of very high quality. "Retina Display" is just a stupid maketing name for a decent LCD.

LukeS_

Kevin Irving wrote: »

As it happens, I had a faulty screen replaced on a Nokia N85. Being cheap, lazy, incompetent and ignorant, they replaced the OLED screen with an LCD. After lots of complaints, I got nowhere. Noone even knew what an OLED was about 2 years...

The iPhone for example used an LCD display, albeit of very high quality. "Retina Display" is just a stupid maketing name for a decent LCD.

The reason as to why Apple named their display the retina display is because of the resolution of 960x640 which is pretty impressive on a 3.5" screen. Compared to my old HTC HD2 and Desire with both 800x480 resolutions there's a big difference within webpages etc.