Even though Samsung has managed to ramp up production enough to keep the SUper AMOLED supply issues out of press, various manufacturers have shipped Super LCD devices happily for the last few weeks.
DisplayMate.com has taken the time to evaluate the two technologies, and has come to the following conclusion:
All of the tested LCDs were considerably brighter than the OLED displays – however, that may change in the near future as OLEDs continue to improve… While “Super” OLEDs have roughly 50 times the Contrast Ratio of “Super” LCDs, when a display is set properly to its optimum screen brightness that superior Contrast Ratio is visually insignificant except under dark ambient lighting, which is seldom the case for mobile displays. While OLEDs love to flaunt their vivid colors and large color gamut, that produces gaudy and over saturated pictures – someday they will turn those down and get it right…
While the iPhone 4’s sharpness is something of an overkill (it’s that high for App compatibility) the PenTile arrangement of the OLEDs has only two sub-pixels per pixel instead of the usual three, so it sometimes appears more pixilated than its stated resolution implies – it’s excellent for photographic images but is noticeably degraded for colored (red, blue and magenta) text and graphics. While all OLEDs behave considerably better with changes in viewing angle than “Super” LCDs, smartphones are primarily single viewer devices and the user can easily orient the phone for the best viewing angle. LCDs are currently more power efficient for brighter images and OLEDs are more efficient for darker images.
But for typical web and app content, which typically use bright backgrounds, the power balance is still decisively in the favor of LCDs by more than 2 to 1 in our tests – again, that should change as OLEDs continue to improve… The big question remaining for OLEDs (and not covered by our tests) is whether the previous uneven aging over time for the red-green-blue OLED sub-pixels has been solved.
Let’s see how long it takes until Samsung ditches PenTile – if they ever do, you will be the first to know!
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