Gadgetory

last time on the pocket now power user we talked about what goes into the glass that makes up the displays on our smartphones and tablets but what about the display technology itself I'm Joe Levi for pocket now that's what we're going to talk about on today's episode of pocket now power user look at now power user is a series of videos that's aimed at taking the average consumer and turning them over time into a power user that's what we're going to do today when talking about display types first up capacitive vs. resistive touchscreens resistive is a little bit older at least in the smartphone and tablet arena than is capacitive so we'll talk about it first essentially when you touch a screen you've got to register that as a touch otherwise it's just a normal screen right a non-touchscreen resistive was essentially a way where you would complete a circuit and that circuit would then translate into x and y coordinates generally speaking you could have one touch point on those at a time though technologies varied in something to add multi-touch and whatnot on them was very nice when you had a stylus and you could make precise touches on the screen but it wasn't very friendly four fingers and really if you wanted to use your finger you needed to use your fingernail that's where we came around two capacitive touchscreens capacitive touchscreens are really really interesting they're much faster you can have multi-point you can have all kinds of cool things and they work very nicely with fingers as we get past the touch technology to the screen technology things get a little bit more interesting first up is LCD or liquid crystal display now what we use in the majority of our devices today if not all of them are TFT displays or thin film transistor technology and yeah I had to look that up because we refer to everything my acronyms anymore it's LCD LCD is just like the old liquid crystal watches that you had way back in the day you know the kind that we're pretty much monochrome and had various areas that lit up and really blocky numbers on them yeah that's LCD liquid crystal display as it sounds they're liquid crystals you running electrical current through this display and it either turns on or off or in today's color screens it turns to a specific color or another kind of what happens is you then have a colored screen but you can't really see much because it's just a colored screen most of the time you have to have light coming through that screen or at least through the crystals to be able to see what whatever that is you can think of lcds it's kind of like a stained-glass window it looks great it's pretty but man it really shines when you're getting a light transmitted through it there are two ways that you can go about doing that one is you can have the display backlit so you have lights at the top the bottom the sides somewhere that reflect down through and are directed back at your eyes and then you see the light that's filtered through these crystals if that sounds inefficient it kind of is but you can still get relatively good screened the other way that you can get light through them is by reflection switching from traditional TFT to IPS LCD screens we see a bump up in several things one of which is price TFT LCD is relatively inexpensive when compared to some of the others but IPS or in place switching gives a little bit better viewing angles a little bit more expensive still takes up a little bit more battery than some of the other technologies that will get to later on next up we've got LED or light-emitting diodes unlike lcds which are just essentially colored swatches l.e.d.s actually transmit light or emit light is the the more physically correct way to say things now if you look at a very large screen like at a football stadium that's probably an LED array with very very big LEDs that are very very bright the concept is the same when you talk about smartphones and tablets that have led displays but the LEDs are much much smaller unlike LCDs that require light to be transmitted through them LEDs emit their own light so you can get rid of the backlight requirement and hopefully a lot of the power requirement as well let's talk about OLED organic LED an organic light-emitting diode essentially this is a really cool technology it's a carbon based technology rather than a silicon-based technology like most diodes and other types of electrical component tree is made up of essentially you've got this carbon layer sandwiched between an anode and a cathode and you run power through and just the right configuration and tada you've got electroluminescent light being projected out towards somebody's eyeballs ok all of you physics guys out there are just going crazy over this I know it but that's as simple as I can make it for everyone else all right the kind of OLED displays that we have in our screens are called am OLED that's active matrix organic light emitting diode just in case you're keeping track of the acronyms here the very lightweight very bright has an awful lot of utility and it's very nice on batteries which is something that we want when we're talking about smartphones and tablets from there we have various different types of ammo led they're super amoled and others that are made by specific manufacturers Samsung's got their own type of thing what we're doing now is we're trying to take the touchscreen technologies and the display technologies and put them all into one combine that with what we talked about before on our last episode the glass types and put all three of the components together and now you can have one unified panel that has not only protective qualities touch input but it also has your light as well as your colors so everything all together in one glass panel it really comes down to personal preference if you want a device that's going to last a very very long time battery life speaking here you probably want to lean to something that's got an AMOLED if you want something that's got very vivid vibrant colors you're probably going to want something that's running on an LCD if you want something that has dark blacks you're probably going to want to lean over to amyloid if you don't really care about that and you want vibrant colors over dark blacks go ahead and go with the LCD last you've got price LCD based technologies are generally less expensive than their AMOLED counterparts ultimately whichever display you like best is the one that you like best and that's the way that it should be they have their pros and their cons and we've gone through them ad nauseam use what looks best to you and you'll be just fine we mentioned earlier pocket now power user is a series of videos that are aimed to make the average user a little bit more intelligent and a little bit more knowledgeable about the technologies that go into our smartphones and our tablets hopefully making you a power user if you like the video make sure you give it a thumbs up and if you want to see some of the other videos in the series make sure you subscribe to our channel so you don't miss out on not only these but all of the other series that we have at pocket now thank you very much for watching I'm Joe Levi I'll get you next time