Appearance-wise, the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL are nearly identical save for the notch. Those similarities even extend to the display, with Google working hard to address last year’s biggest complaint. iFixit has now discovered that the smaller Pixel 3 uses an LG display.
Google’s Pixel 2 XL is still one of our favorite smartphones of all time, but its Achilles’ heel is absolutely the display. Over time Google’s quality control got better, but the LG-made OLED panel in that device was largely a disaster. Now, though, a report claims that Google is once again planning to source LG for its next flagship.
Announced as a “secret project” last year, Google today unveiled a high-resolution OLED display that more than triples the pixels per inch (PPI) count of current consumer headsets from HTC and Oculus. Created in partnership with LG, this screen has a 1443 PPI, wide field-of-view, and is optimized for mobile augmented and virtual reality.
LG has never really struggled in making a stellar display for its flagship smartphones, but I don’t think anyone can argue that LG’s flagships have better panels compared to Samsung’s OLED options. Regardless, LG has stuck to its guns with IPS panels. Now, though, it seems like the company is preparing to switch to OLED…
LG’s upcoming G4 flagship isn’t set to be unveiled until later this month, but the company this evening has announced one feature of the upcoming device. In a press release, LG Display unveiled a new 5.5-inch QHD LCD panel. LG claims that it has achieved a “quantum jump” in color gamut and brightness with this display, while also and perhaps more importantly, reducing power consumption. The display is also much thinner than any display before, according to LG.
You won’t find this display on a smartphone you can buy just yet, but LG Display is today showing off a new 5.3-inch LCD smartphone panel that includes an almost non-existent 0.7mm bezel. That’s even thinner than some of the other super thin bezels to hit recent devices like the Sharp Aquos line and, according to LG, the world’s thinnest.
LG explained how it’s been able to achieve the extremely thin bezel, which it points out is thinner than the 0.8mm thickness of a credit card:
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LG today revealed a new line of OLED display panels that are flexible, rollable, and even transparent. The flexible version sports a resolution of 1200 X 810, and LG says it can produce televisions with this type of display at sizes of up to 50 inches in the future. The panel can be rolled up without affecting its performance at all.
The transparent panel, on the other hand, features 30% transmittance, an improvement over previous models which could only reach around 10%. While you probably won’t want to watch TV on something like this, it’s still quite the technical achievement. The company says it is “confident” that by 2017 it can produce both of these types of displays in ultra HD resolution at sizes of 60 inches or larger (with a transmittance of 40% in the case of the transparent model).
We may all be eagerly awaiting affordable 4k displays for our computers and TVs, but things are starting to get just a little silly in the race for ever higher resolutions in small-screen devices. LG has just announced a 5.5-inch screen with a 2560×1440 resolution, giving it a pixel density of 538ppi.
It’s an impressive technological achievement, but the question we have to ask is: why? Once you get much beyond 300ppi, pixels essentially become invisible at any sane viewing distance. 538ppi is over-kill. Of course, one could ask ‘Why not?’, but there’s a simple answer in mobile devices: both the display itself, and the beefier graphics processor needed to drive it, consume power. Pointless resolution equals pointless reduction in battery-life.
The sad thing is that non-tech-savvy consumers will likely lap it up. Bigger numbers are better, right? It’s the same phenomenon we’ve seen with cameraphones, with manufacturers boasting higher and higher megapixel numbers when any photographer will tell you that cramming masses of pixels into a tiny sensor actually results in worse image quality, especially in terms of low-light performance. It’s why DSLRs have much larger sensors than smartphones.
There’s only one reason you might want ultra-high resolution in a phone: the ability to push the display to a large-screen device.
As an aside, LG refers to the 2560×1440 resolution as ‘Quad HD’. It would be more accurately described as ‘Quad 720p HD’ as it’s the same number of pixels as four 1280×720 displays.
Full press release below …
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According to a new report from Bloomberg, police in South Korea searched offices belonging to Samsung yesterday in a raid connected with an ongoing case related to whether or not Samsung was involved in the leaking of trade secrets. Police originally charged six employees from LG Display related to the theft of OLED technology from Samsung. Reports from last year claimed Samsung employees were fired in connection with leaking the technology, and today an LG spokesperson confirmed the latest investigation is related to its OLED TV panel technology:
“The latest investigation is related to large-sized OLED TV panel technology, but the police have made the allegation themselves,” Son Young Jun, a Seoul-based LG Display spokesman, said by phone today. LG said in July the information its employees were charged with leaking or stealing at the time was widely known in the industry and wasn’t considered to contain trade secrets.
Police in the South Korea wouldn’t comment on yesterday’s raid, but LG reportedly said “it didn’t report Samsung to police in connection with the current investigation.”
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