[Hot News] AMOLED Screen Vs LCD Screen, Pros And Cons Of Each Of These Display Screens

What is an AMOLED screen?

AMOLED stands for Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode. Amoled screens is an amalgamation of OLED technology with active matrix technology. Let us start with understanding what an OLED technology is. OLED is a new thin-film display technology where in organic compounds are used for manufacturing the display LED pixels.

These organic materials have a property where in they require very small amount of electricity to display darker colors when compared to normal LED screens. Thus OLED screens will consume less power from your smartphone, tablet or smartwatch battery, there by increasing the battery life of your device. It is mainly because of this reason that OLED screens became popular in the recent years over the normal standard LED screens. In addition to this, OLED screens are also more crisp and clear in color bifurgations along the edges of the display characters, making them stand out compared to the normal LED screen display.

AMOLED screens are built on top of this OLED screen technology. AMOLED, in addition to the above described OLED technology also introduces Active Matrix display technology. Active Matrix display technology is a way of addressing individual OLED pixels that are quite fast when compared to normal OLED screens, thereby increasing the refresh rate of the pictures viewed on the AMOLED screens making them more responsive. This is particularly useful to perform animations such as pinch to zoom, portrait to landscape screen rotation etc.

However, just like every other things in the world, not everything is rosy with the AMOLED technology and comes with its own unique flaws and challenges. One such particularly important challenge for AMOLED screens lies with its performance in the outdoor scenarios when it is directly exposed to the sunlight. When the device is exposed to the sunlight, AMOLED screens becomes less view-able and no amount of increase in brightness of AMOLED screen helps here.

So to summarize,

Advantages of AMOLED display screen over LCD display screen:

Low power consumption
Increased battery life
Crisp display
Increased responsiveness resulting in beautiful animations

Disadvantages of AMOLED display screen over LCD display screen:

Poor viewability when used outdoors under direct sunlight on screen.
Individual pixels of the AMOLED screens also starts degrading with the passage of time.
Expensive to manufacture compared to standard LCD screen technology.

To overcome this particular sunlight viewability problem, Samsung created a superior technology to AMOLED called the Super AMOLED technology. The display screens built with Super AMOLED technology are much more readable when compared to standard AMOLED screen technology.

What is an LCD display screen?

LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display and are made up of liquid crystals. LCD displays have backlights which are the source of light for the display. This LCD white backlight is passed through these liquid crystals which are then polarized and oriented in different directions.

The direction in which each of these liquid crystals are oriented results in differing intensity of light being emitted out of each crystal. This liquid crystal orientation/directon can be individually controlled using electricity, thus helping us control individual crystal's light emission intensity. Finally a red, green and blue color filter is applied to this light to control the different colors being emitted from individual pixels of the display screen.

IPS display screens are a new breed of LCD display screens that are used in several smartwatches, tablets and smartphones including the Apple iPhones. IPS stands for In-Plane Switching, which is an improvement over the good old standard LCD technology and is said to be easy and cheaper to manufacture compared to AMOLED screens.

Advantages of LCD screen over AMOLED screen:

Cheaper to manufacture.
More natural colors compared to AMOLED
Having a single backlight across the screen results in much balanced color spread and no degradation.

Disadvantage of LCD screen over AMOLED screen:

Lower contrast ratio as the LCD backlight is not turned off is not turned off on an individual pixel basis, even for displaying black color on an individual pixel. Thus some form of light bleeding exists.

Samsung is the biggest promoter of AMOLED screens. Samsung uses AMOLED screens in all of its flagship smartphones including Samsung Galaxy S5, Samsung Galaxy S6, Samsung Galaxy S7 and Samsung Galaxy S8, Samsung Galaxy Note 1, Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and Samsung Galaxy Note 3, in addition to all the Samsung Tablet series line up. Samsung is also one of the leading manufacturer of OLED display screens used in smartphone and tablet markets.

On the other hand, LCD screens have been used since the beginning of smartphone era by almost all other manufacturers including Sony, HTC, Motorola, LG and Apple. Apple, which markets its Retina Display screen is a variant of IPS screen manufactured by LG.

Which one of these two displays are good is a matter of debate. As both the technologies keeps continuously improving with each iteration as time progresses, its is difficult to judge any one superior technology among IPS and AMOLED displays. However, until now AMOLED has performed superior for indoor usage but has been having trouble when exposed to sunlight. On the other hand LCD screens, even though performs well outdoors, is suffered by battery power consumption due to continuous usage of electricity to keep its backlight ON all the time thus shortening the battery life in a daily usage scenario.

[Hot News] AMOLED Screen Vs LCD Screen, Pros And Cons Of Each Of These Display Screens

Related Posts :