“Until Apple Watch, Apple had loyally stuck to LED backlit LCD panels for iPods, iPads and iPhones, but Apple Watch ushered in an OLED display for a variety of reasons,” Mark Reschke writes for T-GAAP. “OLED displays are thinner than LCDs, can draw less power, have flexible options, and are more visible in direct sunlight due to their inherent high contrast ratio (the blacks simply do not wash out).”
“Apple Watch containing OLED is the technology’s seal of approval from Apple,” Reschke writes. “Apple could acquire iPhone 7 OLED displays from Samsung, but the company has been determined to move away from their chief rival, starving them of component sales whenever possible.”
Reschke writes, “JMP Securities Sr. Research Analyst, Alex Guana, recommends purchasing stock in Universal Display Corp. [NASDAQ: OLED], whom he believes will be a major OLED supplier to Apple for the next generation iPhone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple Watch certainly has a gorgeous display. That much, at least, is sure.
Isn’t the power savings of OLED only if screens are predominantly black?
I thought I read somewhere that Applr was using LCD backlit screens because they drew *less* power than OLED (assuming a predominately white web page).
Yes, the only reason why Apple has chosen OLED for AW is that it consumes less with dark/black backgrounds.
It makes no sense in iPhone since OS, applications, browsing and reading all require white backgrounds, and OLED consumes about 1.5 times more than LCD in such circumstances.
By the way, there is no contrast advantage with use of OLED in any other circumstances than looking at it in the darkness. Otherwise screen reflects much more light than LCD emits as “black”, so there is no practical, actual contrast ratio advantage in using of OLED versus LCD.
This is why actual contrast ratio of Apple Watch is not better than that of iPhone, as measured by Displaymate.
I regularly use the invert colors option to read white on black on my iPhone 6 Plus. So to say it requires black on white is not really necessarily true.😱😨😁💥
There are very few people who use inverse settings regularly, so Apple can not make decision on that.
“By the way, there is no contrast advantage with use of OLED in any other circumstances than looking at it in the darkness. Otherwise screen reflects much more light than LCD emits as “black”, so there is no practical, actual contrast ratio advantage in using of OLED versus LCD.”
Are you talking all display devices or just smartphone/tablets?
The contrast ratio advantage is quite evident in OLED HDTVs
OLED HDTVs show contrast ratio advance only in the darkness, too, there is no difference in that.
And the reason is very simple: screen reflects/dissipates 4-6% of light that comes on it. This is much higher than light emission of “black” colour in good IPS LCD TV that comes from its backlight.
So when marketers advertise “infinite contrast ratio” users have to know that it only works in the darkness (though it is not recommended to watch TV in the darkness as it is an eye strain).
Besides, OLED TVs have hard time displaying lower brightness in dark environment since OLEDs skew colour depending on voltage you apply to them to emit light. Samsung had to make them flicker to imitate lower brightness.
This adds to negative effects of watching TV in the darkness in general, so in the end whole OLED’s higher contrast ratio thing is useless.
It’s not just efficiency under black backgrounds, it also greatly affects the brightness when reading in the dark. Blacks no longer are lit up gray and you can reduce the brightness lower in the dark.
How good reading in the darkness is depends on type of OLED.
Samsung’s, for example, flickers in low brightness settings, so even if you would like to read in the darkness — which is not recommended due to rapid vision fatigue effect just from such setting itself — it will give you additional eye strain due to this additional negative effect.
And this is important because I conduct my business, message my friends, and conduct my life in the dark while everyone else is asleep. /s
All the reasons derss suggests plus OLED super-saturates color… fantastic for a watch, where you don’t view photos and want your graphics to pop, terrible for iPad and iPhone.