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The Next iPhone Will Feature An OLED Display, Says Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple Inc. has big plans to outfit its next iPhone with vibrant, energy-sipping organic LED displays, seeking to entice consumers with new technology that's already been embraced by other high-end smartphone makers. The trouble is that the four main suppliers for such components won't have enough production capacity to make screens for all new iPhones next year, with constraints continuing into 2018, people familiar with the matter said, presenting a potential challenge for the Cupertino, California-based company. OLED screens are more difficult to produce, putting Apple at the mercy of suppliers that are still working to manufacture the displays in mass quantities, the people said. The four largest producers are Samsung Display Co., LG Display Co., Sharp Corp., and Japan Display Inc. While Samsung is on track to be the sole supplier for the new displays next year, the South Korean company may not be able to make enough due to low yield rates combined with increasing iPhone demand. The supply constraints may force Apple to use OLED in just one version of the next-generation iPhone, push back adoption of the technology or cause other snags. Apple plans to ship at least one new iPhone with an OLED screen next year, the 10th anniversary of the smartphone's debut, people with knowledge of the matter said. A pair of other new iPhone models will likely feature screens that use older LCD technology, partly because there won't be enough OLED displays to satisfy anticipated demand, according to KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The OLED iPhone, at least, will have a new look that extends glass from the display to the device's back and edges, according to a person familiar with Apple's plans. This all-glass design will have a virtual Home button embedded in an edge-to-edge screen, rather than a physical button that can be pressed, the person added.
We have to hear about the next one a year or two in advance, all the damn time.
Will this allow them to make the phone thinner?
I love my iPhone 7, but the battery still lasts too long, and there's still too many goddam ports and buttons on the thing. I wish Apple would come out with a thinner phone that had half the battery capacity, no Lightning port, and a completely sealed and smooth chassis. Extra points for making it so thin there's no practical way I could ever put it in my pocket and sit down without breaking it. They're almost there with the 6 and 7, but not quite. I hate having any semblance of durability on my premium hardware. The phone should never last longer than the warranty, otherwise there's no reason for me to go out and buy new shiny hardware every 3 years.
Yeah, it consumes less power, but it looks terrible. Starts out dimmer than LCD, gets dimmer with age, color balance starts feeling off subpar, gets terrible with age, always looks bad outdoors, burn-in prone, etc. It also feels like the colors "bleed" more in LED, although that could just be my perception. I know that blacks are supposed to be better with LED than LCD (and thus they get higher nominal contrast ratios), but in most viewing conditions the black difference is not something you notice, unless it's very dark. I once went around to my coworkers and compared my Z2 (LCD) to their cell phones of roughly the same age and resolution and there was no comparison, the Z2 looked way better.
Maybe the technology has advanced significantly since then... but otherwise, no thank you.
Wingus, Dingus! Listen up!
You mean an OLED display like on the Nexus One back in 2009? What's next, wireless charging?
That has nothing to do with OLED. It can be addressed with a simple color profile; but unfortunately Google hasn't yet added color profile support to Android. Samsung has addressed it by hacking color profiles into the version of Android running on their phones. iOS does support color profiles, at least internally (it's how Apple makes their screens so color accurate).
In a nutshell, OLED has completely black blacks, and has a wider color gamut than LED - it can display more saturated colors like in real life. The current TV and web standard for color gamut is sRGB, which unfortunately was a reduction in color gamut from the NTSC standard that was used for CRT TVs. Early LCDs were vastly inferior in color reproduction than CRTs, and manufacturers managed to get the sRGB color standard hobbled to compensate for this. So all images you see designed to sRGB can only display up to about 50% the color saturation of real-life. OLEDs easily cover the Adobe RGB color gamut, which is pretty close to the old NTSC gamut.
When you display an sRGB image on a display which is capable of a wider gamut, it basically stretches the sRGB colors to map them onto the display's gamut. This is what leads to the lurid colors. The green which is supposed to be 50% of the deepest green you can see in real life (maximum green for sRGB) gets mapped to 70% of the deepest green you can see in real life, making it look unnaturally green. But if you calibrate the display with a color profile, the OS sees that the image it's trying to display is sRGB, and correctly maps it to the (roughly) lower 2/3rds of the color range the display is capable of, and the 50% green remains 50%. It's like how a stereo system which can output 200 Watts can also output 100 Watts. But to play music normalized for a 100 Watt stereo system, you have to turn down the volume on a 200 Watt system. Android currently doesn't have a standardized way to turn down the volume. (Meanwhile, the 100 Watt system can never output sound at 200 Watts.)
With proper software support, there's basically no downside to OLED other than burn-in. Color shift and fade can be compensated for by profiling the screen again. Color professionals (photographers, graphics artists, videographers) do this with their own colorimeter they buy. But there's no reason phone stores couldn't have a colorimeter on hand. You could drop by the store once a year, they use their colorimeter to profile your phone in 10 minutes, and you're out the door with a new color profile and accurate colors. But the OS has to support custom color profiles to be able to do this. And the burn-in problem was more or less solved in the CRT days with screen savers. CRTs used phosphors which also suffered burn-in, and a screen saver evened out phosphor use enough to mitigate burn-in. (You younger folks have probably wondered why they're called a screen "saver" - now you know).