by Manufacturer Japan Display has just unveiled a new way of making OLED screens (via OLED-info), promising to deliver twice the brightness of current OLED screens thanks to huge improvements in efficiency, which also means it could be ideal for phones. providing today’s brightness levels with much lower power consumption.
Known as eLEAP, the technology also means OLED panels would have a longer lifespan, estimated by Japan Display to be three times longer than current models, even at the highest brightness levels.
And best of all, this is not a ‘we did it in a lab once’ theoretical breakthrough. Japan Display says it is in talks to begin sample production of OLED displays made with eLEAP by the end of 2022, and plans to provide the technology to other display manufacturers as well.
The technology will work with OLED manufacturing right up to the latest eighth-generation installations, which are coming soon and should mean prices for smaller and larger OLED TVs will drop.
The advantage of eLEAP is that it offers a larger “aperture ratio”, which is basically how much space of each OLED pixel can be dedicated to the light-emitting parts. A bigger window for light means… more light. You don’t have to put in as much power to get high brightness levels if you have wider light-emitting components.
Analysis: Solving many OLED problems at once
The best OLED TVs, like the LG C2 (shown above) continue to be hugely popular with buyers and reviewers alike, thanks to the levels of precision offered by their per-pixel lighting and color control.
However, they do have some continuing drawbacks: They don’t achieve the same brightness levels as elite LED TVs (meaning more reflections are seen and they don’t cut through lighted rooms as well); to achieve higher brightness levels, include an additional white LED, which affects the color range a bit; they have a shorter lifespan than LED TVs; and there is still a chance of getting burned, although this is a minimal danger with newer models, thanks to various techniques used by manufacturers.
At first glance, it seems that eLEAP could fix all this, if it works well. Japan Display suggests it could double the brightness, which could bring it into the same range as high-end LED TVs. A higher brightness could mean there is no need for the white pixel, thus improving the color gamut. Using less power means tripling the lifespan we mentioned earlier. And it’s very likely that using less power also means less heat, and heat is the danger of OLED burning out, so panels are likely to be less susceptible to it.
We’ve been looking at the QD-OLED technology in the Samsung S95B and Sony A95K as the future of OLED TVs, but if Japan Display’s technology can push existing OLED designs in an affordable way, we’re about to have a fight on our hands. .
