Samsung to use Sub-Pixel VGA Screens

pdawerks writes "Samsung Electronics has developed a new graphics chip that will allow half VGA screens to produce VGA resolution. The novelty is specially aimed at future mobiles with VGA screens that will be less than 2.4 inches. It generates color using an entirely new driving method called sub-pixel unit driving methodology." Not sure if I think it is exactly new or not, but it's nifty.

Comments

More Information

[Temporal Outcast]

More details can be found at Deisgntechnica.

Geekzone also has a similar article.

MS Cleartype

[darkmeridian]

The article is really short, but it says that the screen will use sub-pixel technology to allow a half-VGA screen to render VGA resolution. MS Cleartype also uses sub-pixel technology, though to make text sharper.

A linkie with information about sub-pixels in general (though it's on grc.com, whatever.) http://grc.com/cleartype.htm

Re:Sounds Like Interlacing?

[DeepFried]

Interlacing does not double lines. It is just a process that brings the lines up in an alternating (odd/even) sequence. This is now being joined by progressive scan which brings the lines on in order from top to bottom.

Progressive or interlaced, can each scale in lines of resolution to HiDef. 1080i and 720p respectively. (i=interlaced p=progressive)

Interlacing is used to reduce flicker

[GillBates0]

and does not have anything to do with the resolution. Infact, interlacing is sometimes called "interlace scanning", because the gun in the CRT draws alternate lines across the screen to reduce the visible flicker arising due to the time required to move the gun from top to bottom.

As usual, Wikipedia has a good article. To quote:

Interlacing is a method of displaying images on a raster-scanned display, such as a cathode ray tube (CRT), that results in less visible flickering than non-interlaced methods. The display draws first the even-numbered lines, then the odd numbered lines of each picture.

Re:Interlacing is used to reduce flicker

[shirai]

Interlacing is used to reduce flickering? I think not. It used to be used to reduce *bandwidth*.

An interlaced image refreshing at 60Hz (30 full fields per second divided by 2) is going to have the same flicker as a non-interlaced image refreshing at 60Hz.

This is actually a very complex subject to do with how people view images, resolution vs fields per second, what type of images you are viewing, movement vs. still images, etc. but in terms of reducing flicker, I would say, at the very least, the statement is deceptive.

In fact, one of the major problems with old Amigas running in interlaced mode was the annoying (you got it) flicker. This is because a horizontal line that was exactly 1 pixel would turn on and off every 60th of a second. So in this case, it would depend on how you defined the world flicker too.

To be fair, I think what you meant to say was that given the same bandwidth on a non-digitally compressed transmission and without digitally upconverting the signal, you can get 60 fields per second (at 30 frames per second) instead of 30 fields per second (at 30 frames per second) meaning that you will probably get less inter-frame flicker. But even this is deceptive because if you built televisions specifically for 30 frames per second, you could simply reformulate the glow on the screen to last an extra 1/60th of a second longer. But perhaps this is (a) hard to do and (b) back then they wanted the extra fields per second for smoother motion. By the way, a lot of the bandwidth savings doesn't apply to digital due to the way that digital compression works. This was a controversial point during the discussions on HDTV resolutions.

Fudge. I'm trying to cover all my bases here so I don't get flamed for not knowing what I'm talking about. Suffice it to say, interlacing and reduction of flicker do NOT walk hand in hand. It is simply one factor, of many, that comes into play.

Article missing critical technical information

[francisew]

Here is a link to the Samsung website about the technology: http://www.samsung.com/Products/TFTLCD/Technology/ 4colorrandering.htm

I wouldn't complain too hard about the confusion in the details. They couldn't even spell 'rendering' right on their own site (4 color randering???).

It also discusses 'physicail' pixels. I dunno about that.

They seem to have created smaller pixels, which are spatially located across a different area than normal.

They then need fewer wires to connect the given number of pixels. Meaning a higher resolution with fewer interconnects. Maybe I'm completely wrong in this 1 minutes evaluation.

The neat thing is the overlap of their 'logical' pixel arrangements. It would seem they are using traditional dithering with a complicated arrangement of pixels. This should do exactly what they state. Ther weird thing is that their sub-pixel seems to have the wrong number of color sub-elements.

One would expect a ratio of 2:1:1 for green:red:blue emitters. They have 4:2:1. Maybe their red emitters are much brighter than the blue, which would make sense.

They mention replacing some rows with white pixels, but their diagrams don't show anything. Maybe the media-relations people just don't know how the technology works, and are making stuff up until someone corrects them.

Maybe

[Andy Dodd]

They seem to be indicating that the RGBW trick is a whole different thing used to increase brightness (similar to CMYK for printers to make dark black colors).

There is a chance the subpixel rendering trick might depend on the new RGBW setup though, but it seems like they're two seperate technologies.

Re:Nothing is impossible

[stonecypher]

Because current LCD pixels require six lead lines, and we can't make lead lines small enough to shrink the pixels any further. The article phrases this badly: it's not that pixels can't be made smaller. It's that TFT LCD pixels' lead lines take all of the available current space, and there is no current technique on the horizon to solve this. Other monitor types do not have this particular problem; this is peculiar to LCD and OLED.

Good writeup on subpixel rendering

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Here's a very good writeup on how subpixel rendering works:

http://grc.com/ctwhat.htm

It goes into detail with pictures and everything, demonstrating how the technology takes advantage of the separate red, green, and blue subpixels to achieve additional smoothing.

I'm not sure how Samsung intends to implement "white subpixels" though.

Technology from Clairvoyant

[happynut]

The sub-pixel technology was actually licensed from Clairvoyante, and is available to all comers. Clairvoyante calls it a PenTile Matrix.

I know they are working with other panel folks too, so you will probably see more of these type of sub-pixel displays soon.