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Samsung Develops World's First three-inch VGA LCD
Nomad05 writes "Samsung announced this week it has developed the world's first three-inch VGA LCD panel that "directly meets industry interface standards for digital still cameras." What this means is that future LCD screens on digital cameras will allow multimedia to be viewed at a resolution of 640x480. Presently, a majority of camera LCDs only display multimedia at a resolution of 320x240 — significantly lower in quality than Samsung's new LCD.
In layman's terms, expect significantly brighter, more detailed LCD displays, which will enable you to review your photography more thoroughly after you take an exposure. This innovation will make it easier to spot blurry images and ensure your photo is framed properly.
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In my day, we had 320x200, and 16 colors. By God, we were thankful for it!
Says that this ends up in a rock on someone's dashboard on that MTV show "pimp my ride".
The new dell axims have a VGA screen at 3.7"
But now your batteries will last really long now!!
If you go to Intel and ask for one unit of their latest embedded processor, they'll sell you a technology demonstrator kit. It's cost more per unit than if you were buying 200,000 units, but you can actually get one. The same pretty much goes for RAM chips or USB chips or whatever. Not for displays though. For some reason you can only buy displays by the thousands, unless you buy one from someone who has already bought them by the thousands. Most of the time it is cheaper to buy some consumer electronics device which has the component you're interested in it and pull it apart.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The resolution is great, but unless they have a more energy-efficient backlight, battery life is going to really suffer with a display this big.
As for sharpness, the 'better' cameras out there have a button that zooms the image to 100% on the display, and you can quickly navigate around the image at full resolution to check for sharpness and noise that way. I prefer that method over a bigger display because you get a much more detailed view.
I wish camera companies would stop messing with LCD sizes and increasing megapixels and move on to more important things like improving dynamic range.
Enjoy the fun of 8 times your usual battery usage!
In layman's terms, expect significantly brighter, more detailed LCD displays...
Uh, increased resolution means increased amount of electronics behind the glass, which means dimmer, not brighter, display.
So, when we are explaining new tech to people who do not know better, we can just make stuff up, right? Okay, maybe I could buy that you can verify framing easire in some circumstances, but how does resolution have anything to do with brightness?
3.2 Megapixel Phone Camera in Japan with VGA LCD
v 904sh/index.html
http://www.vodafone.jp/english/products/model_3G/
This innovation will make it easier to spot blurry images
That's assuming you don't suffer from hyperopia.
What I'm looking forward to is a few years from now, when my 15.4" laptop screen will have the same DPI as this new panel. Of course it will take a couple gigs of dedicated VRAM, but the SVG based www of the future sure will look crisp on it!
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
VGA at 3" -> a pixel every .095mm, "a human can resolve distances of about 0.93 millimeters at a distance of one meter" wikipedia, 1000 / .93 * .095 = 102mm
So any farther than 10cm (3.9") from the display and you cant see the full detail of the image displayed. I guess it will work.
What do we need that for on Slashdot?
Now I can FINALLY use my digital camera to view pr0n.
we had direct neural transfer at 1600x1200 directly into our brains, bypassing even the eyes! *BEEP*ing time travel.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Getting 640x480 on something that is only 2-3 inches wide is fantastic. If you think about it, that's about 200 dpi, which is pretty darned sharp. (Your average 17" screen is running 1024x768.)
I'd love to see PDAs/Cellphones take advantage of higher resolution displays, too. Though I don't know how that would affect power consumption or processing power.
-David
Sharp and Toshiba both make PDA-sized VGA screens. Maybe NEC, too. I think the Toshiba is a 640x480 screen, while the Sharp is a 480x640 screen.
Look up the Toshiba e805 PDA. Or the Dell Axim x51v (which can be had cheaply). Both feature a 3.8" VGA screen.
So all that's been accomplished is the screen is an inch smaller.
I've had QVGA screens that were 1.6" in size, so they had the same DPI as this screen...
Sounds like we are approaching 300 dpi resolution for LCDs. Can't wait to see this
in 10" laptop screens (something like 1800x2400 displays) and in projectors.
TFA says digital cameras, and then talks about 30Hz. Display syncing is not an issue for still applications- only for video.
What this really means is that you will be able to get crystal clear standard definition screens on your camcorder.
Of course its a bit late. A lot of the cameras now coming onto the market are shooting HDV and soon AVC HD- many in progressive formats and without the frame sync issues of SD video. So... they can include the older 60Hz LCD's and use frame doubling in the framebuffer. They can also use higher resolution small LCD's.
Still this is a great technology, and being able to do this should help Samsung's institutional knowledge about LCD's in general. I hope to see some of these devices used in LCD field production monitors of varying sizes.
SD ain't dead yet.
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
This innovation will make it easier to spot blurry images and ensure your photo is framed properly.
Say what? The images that are rendered onto the tiny screen of a camera are sized down with aliasing algorithms. Although the resizing will happen at 640x480 instead, this will have little impact since we do no longer take memorable pictures at this resolution. Memory is so cheap now and I'm sure we can get four gigs under a hundred bucks soon, too. So, either way, the picture is always going to be scaled down and viewed in proper resolution once you've zoomed in a few times.
Also, the higher resolution won't do anything at all for those of you who want to spot blurred pictures with more ease. Even if it's definitely a higher DPI, you end up watching at 3 inches which is very small, so blurred objects that appear not so sharp will appear sharp on this tiny display, simply because the blurred area will appear so small on a small screen, it won't even be noticable. Once again, zooming in is the only solution.
Either way, I'm sure someone will come up with an algorithm that detects blurred images automatically. It may not be 100 percent proof, but that's still a lot better.
I'm obviously trolling here, however. More DPI is always nice and I bet we can go to 1000 DPI before we stop bothering that much about it, but the arguments used in this article made no sense to me.
Full Tilt
Wow. Jeepers. Glad that stuff was explained in layman's terms. Otherwise I wouldn't have had a clue.
Is this slashdot or CNN?
No sig.
See, when you're trying to angle your camera under the bathroom stall, it helps if the display is... er wait. Never mind.
The 640x480 pixel is much smaller than the 320x240, by a factor of four. There is much more total empty area around the pixels of the higher density LCD than there is around the 320x240. It may seem counter-intuitive, but that's only because some bozo is saying more pixels (actually, there are more, smaller pixels) give you more brightness. It's exactly the opposite.
This would be great for one of those DIY projectors.
I would have included more specs and details on the brightness of the LCD and pixel count had I been more considerate. Again, my bad.
Nomad05
My BlackBerry right now only has a 320x240 display, 3" display. It would be really awesome if RIM could fit this new VGA display in their upcoming models. Maybe the font would have to be made larger, since the letters are tiny even now, but you could have the flexibility of a real VGA on your BlackBerry.
Would be nice.
Marcos
It was hard enough reading text on the 5" screen of the Osborne 1, especially when run in 80 column mode back in the 80s. Heck, not too many years before, geeks were having fun getting the HP-41C goose to fly backwards.
Now these young whippersnappers at Samsung are rocking the boat! Get your microscopes out!
Presently, a majority of camera LCDs only display multimedia at a resolution of 320x240 -- significantly lower in quality than Samsung's new LCD. In layman's terms, expect significantly brighter, more detailed LCD displays, which will enable you to review your photography more thoroughly after you take an exposure. This innovation will make it easier to spot blurry images and ensure your photo is framed properly
Am I the only one feeling that those few sentences were unneeded and even inappropriate for Slashdot? I mean, come on, even if a few of us wouldn't have figured this out by themselves, this is Slashdot..
You just got troll'd!
BAttery usage, power consumption, electricity bills...are we not imprisoned by this resource consumption madness? Every time some innovative technology comes out that sucks a little more juice out of our precious lithion, we shrink back in horror and wisper about how awful it will be, how the world will end.
/*checks time
Madness!
Let us be free. Let the chains of the Watt Dungeons not hold us from indulging in the greatness of Technology! Let us be liberated from this constant fear of the powerless future, for it does not exist! Through technology itself we have conquered these frontiers, we have nuclear plants and solar cells, we have the formidable windmills.. we have enough resources to give thousands of cluster bombs and guided missiles to other nations for free, and we don't have enough for a 3-inch LCD?
It is late. Good night.
Sharp released the V-604SH phone in Japan earlier this year, which had a 640x480 screen in it. I don't know how Samsung qualifies their screen as a world first, but it would seem that their big claim is that it's 3-inches, where the Sharp screen is considerably smaller.
Sharp V-604SH
but "LCD displays"? Like "Liquid Crystal Display displays"?
I mean come on, this is supposed to be a site for techno nerds.
They have a strategic agreement with Samsung, and at least one new semi-pro digital SLR camera due later this year (K10D ?). My only question would be: will there be enough space left on the back for the controls?
(this is not a
So why are we still stuck with desktop LCDs with such crappy resolutions? Laptop LCD screens have been kicking ass for years.
That new Sansung screen has 640x480 in 3in. which means around 266 dpi.
A nice increase in resolution but not something incredible...
Spect more in the future.
_That_ would be something!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
How long before you see it on Pimp My Ride? Every car on that show has AT LEAST three LCD screens
In layman's terms, expect significantly brighter, more detailed LCD displays,
Can we just fuck right off with the phrase "in layman's terms" and the accompanying explanation? This is slashdot, news for nerds. We are nerds. We are NOT laymen. Yes, we know what VGA is. Yes, we know what it means when you double the resolution of an LCD. To suggest we don't demonstrates the editor's complete ignorance of the readership.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Well, yeah. Smaller always makes the news. Take this post, for example. Your post got modded up, and mine is going to get modded down. This is due to the fact that you are 1 inch smaller than me. (By this, of course, I mean dick size.)
Samsung's marketing department was severely reprimanded Friday after convincing R&D there was a market among squirrels for VGA monitors.
Am I the only one wondering if the next iPod will have a VGA display?
The Admin and the Engineer
That is some small pixels! Now I can really squint my eyes at the display! Honestly, I just hope the design engineeers would design and use some noice and readable icon and fonts when using this type of small but higher resolution display!
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
So I make that 267 DPI. Is it possible yet to get a 200 DPI monitor for a desktop computer? Say, 17 inch?