I wrote an article not long ago that advocated for screens with a higher refresh rate on Chromebooks, and there’s a chance that we’re one step closer to this reality than we were before. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the latest news is necessarily intended for Chromebooks, but it’s a step closer to seeing this highly updated reality.
Reported by Ars Technica today, Samsung is apparently preparing “large quantities” of its 14-inch OLED monitors for use on laptops this year. For reference, Samsung makes screens for a ton of electronics that you see around you every day, including phones from Apple, Google, Samsung and OnePlus, so it’s not strange to see the company increasing production for manufacturing outside itself.
These screens look absolutely incredible, but the big news here is the fact that we’ll probably see more options across the board for further updating and OLED on laptop screens. As you probably already know, OLED is easily the most beautiful type of screen you can get. They tend to be a little more expensive and can be a big hit with the drums, but there are ways around that. While OLED is great for conserving battery with darker pixels, the white and lighter colored dots on your screen really pull the battery, as witnessed by the abysmal battery life on the original Samsung Galaxy Chromebook.
However, as Ron Amadeo notes in his article, Samsung has discovered battery problems with OLED screens in phones over time, and will likely do so with laptops in time. It is not clear at this point whether or not these newer monitors will leverage any new technology to help in this department, so we will simply have to wait and see. Based on the video above, however, I am inclined to feel that Samsung is quite proud of these new panels and is ready to normalize OLED laptops on the market.
What about Chromebooks?
So, with these large quantities of OLED laptop screens, does this mean that we will be able to see our first 90 Hz OLED Chromebook this year? That is an unknown quantity, actually, but I am not having high hopes yet. Screen technology tends to be deployed first on Windows laptops and then on Chromebooks, so it may be a while before we see these panels on a Chromebook.
This logic is altered with the fact that Samsung opted for the 4K OLED panel on the original Galaxy Chromebook a year ago. In a time when few OLED laptops existed, we have the Galaxy Chromebook and all its $ 1000 extravaganza. If it could be combined with a bigger battery and some better optimization, there is no reason why one of these panels doesn’t end up on a Chromebook in 2021 to easily become the best panel we’ve ever seen on a Chrome OS laptop. There is already built-in support for higher refresh rates, so why not?
At this point, we found no evidence that this is the case, but the exact display panel is not always clear when we are digging into the Chromium Repositories, so that is not indicative in any way. Although I hope to see a 90 Hz OLED Chromebook this year, I bet we’ll see Windows laptops arrive with this screen technology first, the market will normalize a little bit around the idea of standard, gaming-free laptops with high rates of update and OLED screens, and then we’ll start seeing it on Chromebooks. But it’s a step closer anyway, right?
