At the SID Display Week 2011 International Symposium May 17-19, Samsung will be demonstrating a 10.1-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600) format PenTile RGBW tablet display while rival LG will be also there with a full line-up of Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching (AH-IPS) products.
Samsung's prototype demonstration marks the first time this resolution has been available for the tablet market in the 10.1-inch format. Samsung expects to have commercial availability of this technology for tablet applications later this year.
The 10.1-inch 300 dpi display is ideal for applications that require extraordinary image and text clarity such as browsing the web and viewing high-definition movies, or reading books and spreadsheets.
"In order to develop tablets with the form and function that consumers demand, a design engineer ultimately has to determine how to get the highest resolution display possible, while still fitting within the overall power budget for their design," said Joel Pollack, executive vice president of Nouvoyance, Samsung's affiliate company that developed the PenTile RGBW technology.
Lightness and power efficiency of the display are critical factors since higher resolution displays typically draw more power.
"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.
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.
At the same event, LG Display will introduce a full line-up of products that employ IPS technology to deliver ultra high resolution, including 3.5- and 4.5-inch panels for smartphones, 7- and 9.7-inch panels for smartbooks, and 55- and 84- inch panels for TVs.
"Consumers can enjoy crisp and clean pictures in any device like smartphones and smartbooks with LG Display's proprietary AH-IPS technology," said President and CEO of LG Display Mr. Young Soo Kwon. "Our goal is to be the world's No. 1 display maker that consistently delivers groundbreaking technologies like IPS to innovate the display industry."
AH-IPS technology, an advanced form of IPS, has realizes 1.5 to 2 times the resolution of typical LCD panels. This ultra high resolution becomes particularly valuable when the emphasis is on displaying highly detailed images. The technology also improves display's color accuracy, which in turn leads to reproduce the original color precisely without color distortion. In addition, it provides greater light transmission which translates into lower power consumption while delivering high picture quality.
Resolution is generally defined by the total number of pixels whereas image crispness is measured by pixels?per-inch (PPI) which refers to pixel density per unit area. The ultra high resolution technology employed by AH-IPS adds a greater number of pixels than the PPI that can be recognized by the human eye at a typical distance. This makes it more difficult for the naked eye to distinguish each individual pixel, thus making the image sharper.
LG Display's 3.5-inch smartphone panel supports 960x640 pixel resolution at 326 PPI.