With the advantages of self-illumination, OLED is now the hottest high-end display technology. Nowadays, OLED TV has become synonymous with high-end TV, and OLED screen mobile phones are basically fully covered in high-end products. In addition, since 2021, OLED screens have accelerated their popularity on laptops and tablets, and the price of a variety of OLED displays launched in the market this year has also approached the high-end liquid crystal displays of the same size. Counting the OLED version launched by Nintendo for the Switch, several of the screens we most often encounter in our daily lives already have OLED panels to choose from.
The benefits of OLED panels needless to say, self-illumination can achieve a very delicate light control effect, and the transparency of the picture is still difficult to achieve lcd TVs such as Mini-LED. Through pixel shift, software and hardware optimization and other technologies, the problems of low life, easy burning screen, PWM dimming and eye damage have been effectively alleviated by early OLED. Many people who once shouted "LCD is never slave", many also chose OLED panels out of requirements for picture quality, and even many users preferred OLED.
However, as an emerging technology that is still in the explosive period, OLED is not as "simple" as it seems, and the OLED panel used in mobile phones, monitors, computers and other products is not a unified technical route, and some are even greater than the difference between liquid crystals and OLED. Of course, the advantages and disadvantages are also different, if you can't distinguish the difference between them, it is easy to ask for fish when purchasing, not only can not meet their own needs, but also add unnecessary trouble. Today I will take you to distinguish the difference between several OLED technologies.
Let's talk about the phone closest to you. Under the leadership of Samsung and Apple, high-end mobile phones now basically use OLED screens, or AMOLED screens. The OLED on the mobile phone is closer to the OLED paper technology in our cognition, and the RGB three-color pixels are self-illuminating, forming a display effect. However, in fact, due to the influence of materials and other aspects, the life of the three seed pixels of red, green and blue is different, to be precise, the life of the blue subpixel is the shortest, followed by red, and the human eye is the most sensitive to green, so the green subpixel has the longest life. If OLED arranges subpixels uniformly like a liquid crystal, problems such as color casts and uneven display will occur after a period of use. Therefore, in fact, the OLED pixel arrangement of the mobile phone needs a special arrangement, increasing the display area of red and blue subpixels, so that they can reduce their luminous brightness and increase the service life of the OLED panel.
The technology represented by SuperAMOLED makes the three primary color sub-pixels diamond-shaped arrangement, and through the universal sub-pixel technology, a green subpixel serves the red and blue sub-pixels on both sides at the same time, realizing the effect of continuing the life of the panel.
However, the common subpixel technology has caused pixel loss problems, the drill row OLED panel is attenuated by about one-third compared to the actual resolution of the RGB panel, the sharpness will also be discounted, in addition, due to the shape of the diamond arrangement, the oblique lines can not use three colors, so the phenomenon of color edges will occur.
It is worth mentioning that SuperAMOLED is Samsung's patented technology, domestic panel manufacturers have also explored technologies such as Delta arrangement in recent years, but because the pixel loss is more serious than the diamond arrangement, the clarity is not high, it is jokingly called "Zhou Dongyu arrangement", and now domestic manufacturers basically use similar diamond arrangement technology, Zhou Dongyu has been gradually eliminated.
The OLED panel on the mobile phone is certainly more mature, but the problem of resolution loss makes the TV set more sensitive to resolution, and even the need for point-to-point display products are not very suitable. Therefore, OLED TVs use a technology commonly known as WOLED.
In principle, WOLED is actually closer to a self-illuminating LCD TV. The W of WOLED refers to the fact that the TV uses the OLED panel as a backlight, so that the OLED uniformly emits white light (or yellow light, etc.), and then displays red, green and blue tricolor imaging through the polarizer. OLED TVs do not have color casts and "rag screen" issues caused by different subpixel lifetimes.
In addition, television sets have high requirements for brightness, and video formats such as HDR require the peak brightness of the TV to reach at least 1000 nits or more. WOLED technology increases the brightness of the picture by adding white subpixels in addition to RGB. It should be noted that although white sub-pixels are also added, compared with the RGBW LCD TVs that were popular in previous years, WOLED TVs are still 4K point-to-point display panels, so they are not fake 4K TVs.
WOLED has a longer lifespan, but its technical characteristics of opening white subpixels in high-brightness screens will "dilute" the color of the TV, especially in bright and vivid scenes, the color performance is not satisfactory.
In order to solve the problem of color attenuation under the high brightness of WOLED TV, QD-OLED technology came into being. As the name suggests, QD-OLED integrates the technical characteristics of quantum dots (QuantumDot) and OLED, replaces the polarizer with photo-induced quantum dot materials, allows OLED to display color in synergy with quantum dots, QD-OLED not only increases brightness, but also effectively uses the ultra-high color rendering of quantum dot technology, according to tests, QD-OLED can reach 90% of the BT.2020 color gamut, breaking the color gamut record of the active display panel.
In addition, QD-OLED technology is based on RGB three-color display, without white sub-pixel interference, which eliminates the problem of color attenuation. On the whole, QD-OLED is the display technology with the highest picture quality potential at this stage, and this year Sony and Samsung have also launched their own QD-OLED TVs, which are the best choice for TV enthusiasts.
In addition to the TV field, Samsung has also extended the tentacles of QD-OLED to medium-sized display panels such as monitors, and jointly launched an alien-branded QD-OLED display with Dell. QD-OLED displays have a slightly different pixel arrangement than TVs, but the technical principles are much the same. Although QD-OLED can achieve a fairly high level of image quality expression, there are still some problems with QD-OLED at this stage. For example, although the subpixel arrangement of the triangle does not have the problem of resolution loss, it will form a color edge at the edge of the image, which is especially obvious for displays with more scenes such as display windows and text, in addition, the QD-OLED structure is simple, and the ambient light is not blocked by the polarizer, which will reverse excite the quantum dot material and pollute the picture. Therefore, QD-OLED is not very suitable for scenes with direct light hitting the screen.
It is worth mentioning that the WOLED panel is currently the exclusive supply of LGDisplay, while the QD-OLED is temporarily monopolized by Samsung, and the OLED TV is actually a competition between two Korean companies. From a technical point of view, QD-OLED uses printed technology, which is theoretically cheaper than WOLED's evaporation technology, but because WOLED technology started early, it has been quite large in OLED TVs, and the current price of WOLED, which occupies a large-scale industrial advantage, is far lower than QD-OLED, and even lower than some high-end Mini-LED TVs.
In addition to QD-OLED, JOLED launched OLED panel is also manufactured using a printed process, has launched several 27-inch display products, using standard RGB pixel arrangement, so peak brightness and other hard parameters are not as good as QD-OLED panel, but standard RGB for professional display, especially the display is very suitable. At present, this panel is listed not long ago, the price is still relatively high, using the panel Philips 27E1N8900 price is about 5500 yuan.
As a special display, the notebook screen is also more special in terms of requirements. The need for actual resolution makes it impossible to arrange the diamonds, so the OLED on the notebook uses a special RGB arrangement scheme. The Nintendo SwitchOLED edition also uses this OLED arrangement scheme. Except for the absence of common subpixel problems, the arrangement of diamonds is much the same, and I will not repeat them here.