Gadgetory

hello my name's Gary Sims and this is Android authority now at the moment we have two major types of display technology in our smartphones that's LCD liquid crystal display and OLED technology including hammer lid and that stands for organic light-emitting diode now there is in the future a new technology coming called micro LED or micro LED and this offers lots of benefits over OLED and LCD so if you want to find out more about micro LED and what it means for smartphones of the future please let me explain let's start with a bit of context LCD displays use a backlight that is shown through a matrix of liquid crystals that can be altered to let certain amounts of light through and that is very good and well known technology and we have it in lots of things from laptops or smartphones and TVs its disadvantage for mobile is that the backlight is always on even when the screen is black which means that it's very hard to get those really deep contrast and deep blacks and you are using sort of power on the display even when actually it's not displaying anything and the other technology is OLED that's organic light-emitting diodes these are LEDs that use an organic compound and they can be switched on and off individually which means you get better blacks you get better contrast and it uses less power now if you want to find out more about the details of both those types of displays I have a video linked up here which compares OLED to IPS LCD 2 retina displays into infinity displays and gives you kind of an understanding of all these different technologies and how they are used in our smartphones today now micro LED uses the same technology as Oleg we're talking about light emitting diodes we're not talking about a backlight with a kind of crystal matrix we're talking about individual pixels that we turn on off but as you guessed by the word micro they are much smaller and the reason they're much smaller is they are using inorganic compounds to produce the actual the red green and the blue pixels now micro LED technology has several advantages over current OLED technologies including that the displacement actually be thinner because you no longer need a polarizing and an encapsulation layer these are some of the layers that you find in the overall manufacture of OLED displays it actually makes the over all display a lot thinner but it's more than just thinner because actually the way these LEDs work because of this type of compound this inorganic compound they're using you actually need to use less battery life less power is needed in fact some estimates say that an micro LED display you did 90 percent less power than an LCD display and up to 50 percent less power than an OLED display so here we're talking about significant power reductions in micro LED displays and because micro LED displays use inorganic materials they don't suffer from the same burning problems that you can get with OLED displays if you want to find out more about why you get burning and what happens with the blue pixels on OLED displays I've got a video up here it talks all about it so we've got thinner displays and we've got less power and we've got no burning issues these are all great advances that micro LEDs can give us but there's also another big advantage because they are micro LEDs you can pack more pixels into a smaller space you get greater pixel density and so there will be excellent for 4k and even for 8k displays but of course there is a catch and that is these micro LED displays are very hard to make so for example this year at CES SC is 2018 Samsung demonstrated a big television 146 a television which they called the wall which was based on micro LED technology it was modular it wasn't one big panel it was several panels that they're able to stick together and the problem is is that Samsung was saying that the yields on even these big panels is actually very very low now there is a thing called the pitch which is the distance between the pixels now the pitch on these big displays was actually quite large which is why they actually chose to make it a wall because you have to see it from far back now you can imagine of course on a smartphone you're seeing it with only just you know a few centimeters away so you need a very small pitch between the individual pixels you don't want kind of black lines appearing and as of yet to make those micro LED displays with a small pitch and a high pixel density is still not commercially viable now fan some said at sea yes they're expecting to see micro LED displays appearing within the next two to five years now whether they meant just for televisions or whether they meant for televisions and for smartphones I'm not sure but you can certainly imagine this is going to be a long-term investment from companies like Samsung and in fact it's not only Samsung are involved in this there are rumors that Apple are involved in micro date displays LG are involved in micro LED displays and you can be sure that other companies are also researching and looking at this technology and of course as you can imagine the first generation of these displays that come out are going to be expensive we're talking low yields we're talking the new technology and they're definitely going to be what in high-end televisions and super ultra flagship smartphones but of course over the long term the prices will come down but we're talking five plus years before this starts to trickle down into kind of you know the mainstream so as a quick summary micro lead gives you the same advantages as OLED that includes the fact that each of the pixels can go on and off individually gives you those nice deep blacks it gives you a good contrast ratio and a wide color gamut and you also get thinner displays greater pixel density and they use less battery life up to 90 percent less than a standard LCD display but unfortunately they're hard to make they aren't yet commercially viable and when they do finally come out they are definitely going to be expensive however ignoring the price and the consumer viability I think as we look for the long term it's going to be interesting to see how micro LED displays filter down into the mainstream and what that can mean for our smartphones in five six eight years from now maybe we're all going to be carrying around 4k 8 k displays that use less battery life wouldn't that be great so it's going to be interesting to see how this turns out okay my name's Gary Sims and this is Andrew authority I really hope you enjoyed this video if you do please do give it a thumbs up also please let me know in the comments below are you excited about micro LED technology what it can mean for smartphones the VR of the future also please do subscribe to the channel and don't forget to share this video on social media okay that's about it please don't forget to go over to Andrew orator calm because we are your source for all things Android