AMOLED Displays Are Now Cheaper To Produce Than LCD (androidauthority.com)

An anonymous reader quotes an article on AndroidAuthority: Optics pundits have been crowing about AMOLED destroying LCD for a while now: they are thinner, brighter, more energy efficient and arguably offer better colors, higher contrast, and deeper saturation than LCD. The biggest barrier stopping AMOLED from taking over as the smartphone display technology of choice has been price. Until now that is. As predicted two years ago, it has only taken 24 months for AMOLED production costs to fall below that of LCD. Production costs in the first quarter for a 5-inch Full HD smartphone display are $14.30 for an AMOLED panel and $14.60 for an LCD display. In the fourth quarter of 2015, these figures were $17.10 and $15.70, respectively. [...] With AMOLED production costs dropping below LCD for the first time, AMOLED panels will soon become the default display technology choice for manufacturers on their mid-range and entry-level devices as well.

Comments

I wouldn't call the death of LCD just yet.

[Agent0013]

For the wall mounted TV panels I have gotten Plasma and love it. I don't really understand why LCD is much more popular because all of the things you would want in a picture seem to lean to Plasma as better. Better contrast, darker blacks, brighter more vibrant colors, better viewing angle. The only thing that LCD has on it's side is better bright light viewing, but my TV is not in the sun-room, so that is not a problem for me and probably most people. And burn-in has not been a problem with the two of them that I have had. On the first one you might see after images for a minute when you left something paused, but they always went away quickly.

Sometimes there are strange "Sheeple" reasons why some things succeed and other fail in the marketplace.

Re:And Apple doesn't have it

[thegarbz]

It has been used in TVs for a while now

Right I missed that. Did a bit of digging. Not as good as OLED colour wise. Not as good as Plasma either. Slightly better than standard LCD (but then so is my 10 year old monitor). Shows that you should never believe the marketing. But I guess it's still cutting edge in that it's not available in any high-DPI displays that I can see.

Major interim benefit of QDLCD is that you don't lose as much energy as with a colour filter. The backlight dominates power consumption in the phone

I read that as something else. It means BRIGHTER displays :-). Don't be under the delusion that you'll ever get better battery life. The energy efficiency gains are always offset by vendors somehow, just like Intel's processors were always offset by yet another version of Windows bogging things down.

I have to say I'm not impressed with the idea that anyone is "innovating" in the LCD space. Given that Apple gets their panels manufactured by others I don't understand why they wouldn't just switch straight to AMOLED. But I guess time will tell.

Re:No thanks

[AmiMoJo]

15 years ago it was "look at this LCD shit, built down to a price and dies after a few years, dead pixels everywhere, scaling sucks, I'll stick with my trusty 20 year old 20kg CRT thanks!"

It's just survivor bias. There has been cheap crap forever, we just think older stuff was more reliable because we have some examples of it surviving for a long time. Cars are the worst, people moan that modern ones are too complex and suck while forgetting that the old ones tended to fall apart as everything rusted away after 5 years.