Samsung manufactures ‘very large quantities’ of 90Hz OLED displays for laptops

The world’s largest OLED maker is pushing for more OLED laptop screens. A press release from Samsung Display says the company is manufacturing “very large quantities of 14-inch, 90Hz OLED displays for laptops and notebooks, starting in March.” Apparently Samsung has a lot of orders coming up, and the company says that “several global IT companies are expected to release new laptops or notebooks with 90Hz OLED displays this year.”

Usually faster refresh rate displays are the realm of gaming laptops, where you can go from super-fast 90Hz to 300Hz (which seems like overkill), but they’re all LCDs. Thanks almost entirely to Samsung, OLEDs have taken over smartphones completely, with the company supplying panels to Apple, Google, its own Galaxy line, OnePlus, and just about everyone. On many Android phones, these are either 90Hz or 120Hz displays, and now it looks like Samsung is ready to move into laptops.

OLED screens are a grid of light-emitting organic material (this electrified pickle video is a great explainer) and are generally thinner and less complicated than LCD screens. LCD screens need a ton of layers: a backlight to illuminate the screen, various layers of polarizers and diffusers, the liquid crystal layer of the same name to turn pixels on and off, and a color filter. The single light source of an LCD for the entire screen (sometimes “areas” of light with local dimming) means that LCDs cannot match the high contrast of the OLED, where every pixel is equally. its own source of light. OLEDs can turn off pixel light sources individually, so “black” can be really black with the screen not producing any light.

OLEDs do have a few issues, however. They use less power while showing darker colors (great for dark mode advocates), but overall power consumption on early OLED laptop screens was quite high. Samsung’s OLED Chromebook was known for its very poor battery life. Samsung does have this problem licked off smaller phone panels though, so give it a bit of time.

Another potential problem is burn-in, which OLED panels are susceptible to over time. Windows laptops aren’t expected to have the constant movement of OLED TVs, with things like the taskbar, icons, and browser tabs all staying in one place day after day. A 2018 study on OLED screens in smartphones showed burning effects occurring as early as 5 p.m. While it would be crazy to have a smartphone app open for this long, I have tabs open for over 17 hours on my laptop right now. The Windows start button will likely display thousands of hours on the screen in a year or two, which is a real problem considering the longer replacement cycle of laptops compared to smartphones.

There are a few 60Hz OLED laptops out there today, but few. Samsung’s last big push was with the Samsung Galaxy 2020 Chromebook, which had a stunning 4K OLED display in a $ 1,000 Chrome OS laptop. A year later, the company decided that such an expensive Chromebook wasn’t a good idea and reverted to an LCD display and a lower price tag in this year’s version. Smaller 12-inch OLED displays are also regularly appearing on Samsung’s tablet line.

At CES 2021, Samsung released a promotional video on the company’s OLED laptop screens, promising under-display cameras, panels 50% thinner than an LCD, 30% weight reduction and bezels. thinner.