Mobile Display Technologies

Today my focus is on the latest Mobile Display Technologies...let's have a deeper insight into some of the upcoming models

Super AMOLED

This is the technology that Samsung's been touting for months now as a way to fix all our AMOLED woes. With the latest revision, the color clarity and brightness of the display have been greatly increased, offering what Samsung claims is much better performance in direct lighting compared to previous models. So far, those claims seem to be true, with the company's latest Super AMOLED screens holding their own when stacked against traditional LCD displays.

Transflective LCD

Engadget put it nicely when they described transflective screens as "a sunlight-viewable tech that has been all but abandoned in modern smartphones." The displays were most famously used in older BlackBerries, winning praise for its great outdoor performance, but derided for poor resolution and color contrast. Now, companies like LG have begun investigating new uses for the tech in the laptops, offering models that can swap their backlights for ambient sunlight instead.

E-Ink

By now you should know all about E-Ink. The tech, used in Kindles, Nooks and Readers, appears very similar to conventional newsprint, and requires no backlight for illumination. The result is a screen with a very high contrast ratio that, by design, works almost flawlessly in direct sunlight, without suffering from a washed out image. And while E-Ink displays are still grappling with a lack of color and poor refresh rates, their superb outdoor performance means we should be seeing them in more future devices once the kinks are worked out.
  

Pixel Qi

Like Transflective LCDs, Pixel Qi's upcoming screen has the ability to change its state based on levels of ambient lighting. However, instead of harnessing ambient light to illuminate its LCD crystals, the Pixel Qi switches to an E-Ink mode instead. This approach combines the strengths of an LCD with the flexibility of an E-Ink display, and is even capable of rendering decent colors while running in the outdoor mode.

Anti-reflective Coatings

Traditional LCDs are notoriously bad for their poor performance under direct light, but very cheap to produce. As a result, some manufacturers have been investigating the use of coatings or layers to improve the performance of conventional TFT LCDs. We've mentioned a Sony-developed coating in the past that claims to reduce the amount of reflection from ambient light on glossy screens. The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has been studying a similar approach, based on the biology of moths, which could keep those old panels relevant for a few more years.

LED Backlit LCD

Instead of abandoning LCD panels entirely, some companies have tried to tackle outdoor performance from another angle. The IPS display in the iPad and iPhone, for example, uses an LED backlight that is much brighter than most other devices. By increasing the intensity of the backlight, the ability to view the device in sunlight is also increased. This is why the original PSP-1000 had its backlight revamped in later models, as well as devices like the DS Lite. However, we're still dealing with LCD screens here, and performance under direct lighting still sucks — just not as much.

So would you like to see any of these displays in your electronic gadgets such as TV, Laptop, etc or do you feel none of these have the potential to hit it big and that you'd much rather wait for the next big thing? Do let us know what opinions you hold about these technologies