This may not be the augmented reality headset that everyone's talking about right now,
but hidden away at the Samsung display booth is a showcase from the recently acquired
Imagine that absolutely blew my mind.
Apple, I don't ask you for much, but can you please use this tech
in your upcoming AR VR headsets? Like, check this out.
Inside this black box is a micro OLED display
that's so bright, they warned me not to look at it for more than a second or two at a time.
They claim that it reaches a brightness of 10,000 nits.
And I gotta tell you guys, I believe them, like it's physically painful to look at,
which raises a big question. Why would anybody want a display that's so bright?
It's painful to look at. A few reasons, actually. In a head-mounted display application,
which is what these are for, you lose a ton of the brightness to the lens
that stretches the display to fill your field of view. Also, certain applications like 3D
can cause a lot of light loss, and a big one is low persistence, okay?
When you're moving your head around, when there's a fast-moving object going by,
you can achieve really great motion clarity by strobing the light,
which means anytime it's not shining, you're losing some of that potential brightness.
At pixel densities of up to 2,600 pixels per inch,
these things are like having a movie theater that you can stick your eye into.
But that wasn't enough for Imagine. That's where these guys come in.
Instead of using a traditional printed-on mother-glass approach to OLED manufacturing,
like we see in laptops or tablets, they are using a silicon deposition method
of manufacturing the displays. So what they're doing is they're taking
a super fine mask like this, and they're building up these displays,
sub-pixel by sub-pixel, just like you would a microprocessor.
And this has a couple of key advantages. First is the pixel density.
3,500 pixels per inch.
That is absolutely wild. They've got a demo chip here
that they've got a 7x magnification thing sitting on,
and you can't even begin to see anything resembling an individual pixel.
We're talking one micron between each one,
no screen door effect. And the other big one is power consumption.
They're claiming that these will be able to run at something like, I think it's a fifth, one fifth,
one fifth the power consumption of the more traditional manufacturing method.
Now, I think you can see already that this is far from mass production.
This is a mere 200 millimeter wafer when the big kids are using 300 millimeter wafers.
But my belief is that as they scale this up,
given what we know about silicon manufacturing, we could expect not only the advantages we just discussed,
but also the economies of scale. So, hey, Apple, if you're watching,
who would love to see this in a future Vision Pro headset? Vision Pro 2, perhaps?
Oh, I also love to see what we're gonna see in future laptops. After this message from our sponsor.
We know that MacBooks have great battery life thanks to the M series chips that Apple
has been cranking out, but their battery life could be even better
because right now the biggest draw is going to be their displays.
But Samsung's been cooking up some pretty cool color techniques
that are going to like trick your brain into perceiving more color with a lower power budget.
Now, here we have an LCD display and an OLED display. Something we've had to do for a long time with LCD displays
is crank up the brightness to make something appear more green.
But with new OLED technology from Samsung Display,
they can provide higher color saturation. So that green is actually more green.
Like, have you ever looked at like a flower before? It's not brighter, but they can have specific very deep blue or red hues
that you just can't see on a display. When we measure our LCD display,
we see that as we're pulling around the 300 nits region.
But we go to our OLED display
and we're getting around 270 nits. So about a 10% reduction in overall luminance,
but to the human eye, it appears to be a little bit brighter.
Now, there's a couple of caveats. We can see that the color temperatures aren't perfectly lined up.
These are two different display technologies. They're not going to be a one-to-one comparison.
But in theory, if you can get a 10% power savings just from going to OLED,
that's going to have, help your battery life a huge amount. But what else is really cool
is over here is their color technology. This is the color trickery that I was talking about.
Here we have what they're calling intelligent color technology.
So here we have two displays, but one of them is using about 10% less power.
To save even more energy, Samsung Display is employing a couple of cool techniques.
On this side, they're using advanced edge luminance profile
plus intelligent color technology. What the heck does that mean?
Basically, what they're doing is that they're dimming the very edges of the display
to reduce the amount of overall power that your backlight's using.
And it's really, really subtle. You can see it when we change it side by side here.
We're going to 5%, a 10% reduction, 15, 20.
If you take a close look, you can see right around the edges
that that's actually changing. But it's really not affecting the main content of the image
where you're going to be putting the stuff you're looking at. And even right now, I don't really mind the vignetting,
especially when you're supposedly getting 34% power saving, whatever that means, Samsung Display.
So what's holding Apple back from switching to OLED laptops?
Well, one thing is that Apple sells a ton of laptops
and you can't get that many displays from the current mother glass.
You see, every single display is cut from a big, huge sheet of glass.
This is how big their mother glass is today. And in 2025, this is how big it's going to be,
which means they're going to be able to make a ton more displays.
But hey, Samsung Display got to steal from Apple too. Look, dynamic island.
Moving over to things Apple should borrow from Samsung Display, a big focus for them this year
was the durability of their foldable screens.
And while I have had some personal, bad experiences
with them, my Z Fold 3 has the microcracks down the middle.
It's clear that they've been hard at work on new form factors that take better advantage
of some of their new advancements. Like this one that is foldable and slideable
and this laptop that can just, you know, casually go from basically per storable
to having a pretty decent size display.
Okay, realistically, Apple's not going to make a MacBook with screens on the top and bottom like this,
but this is something we'd be very likely to see. They're showing off an OLED display
with a peak brightness of 3,000 nits this year.
That is, what? This is all OLED. There's a cutie OLED.
Now we've been talking a lot about OLEDs, but what about them cuties?
We already used that intro line pretty much. Damn, a lot of the cutie OLED action
has been in the monitor space. And we're going to be showing you guys a lot of cool videos about that very soon.
But in the TV space, brightness is the game. And the next generation of cutie OLED panels
is going to be 50% brighter, going from 2,000 nits to 3,000 nits peak brightness.
It's really hard to show on camera, but honestly, it can get almost too bright at times
for this footage. I feel like we're almost losing details
with just how bright it is compared to this. Look at the green on here.
And it's mind-boggling.
Now we're not going to be seeing an increase in color gamut on these new OLED panels.
Brightness is the main focus. But cutie OLED already covers 90%
of the Rec 2020 color space, which is crazy.
But it allows them to get Pantone certification, which is great for creators.
A big, big crowd for Apple. Making sure that they know that their renders
that are on their screen are going to look like the product they'll actually receive in real life.
There is a lot of amazing features that we really, really want to see,
especially in Apple devices. Make sure to subscribe to ShortCircuit.
So if Apple actually ends up using these displays, you'll be the first to know.
And it'll be so cool. It'll be great.