Samsung
The world’s largest OLED manufacturer is promoting more OLED laptop screens. A press release from Samsung Display says the company is making “large quantities of 90 Hz, 14 inch OLED screens for laptops and notebooks, starting in March”. Apparently, Samsung has a lot of orders coming in, and the company says that “several global IT companies are expected to launch new laptops or notebooks with 90 Hz OLED screens this year.”
Typically, faster refresh rate screens are the realm of gaming laptops, where you can go from 90 Hz to 300 Hz extremely fast (which seems overkill), but these are all LCDs. Thanks almost entirely to Samsung, OLEDs have taken full control of smartphones, with the company providing panels for Apple, Google, its own Galaxy line, OnePlus and just about everyone else. On many Android phones, these are 90 Hz or 120 Hz monitors, and now it looks like Samsung is ready to expand to laptops.
OLED monitors are a grid of light-emitting organic material (this video in electrified pickles is a great explanation) and are generally thinner and less complicated than LCDs. LCDs need many layers – a backlight to illuminate the screen, several layers of polarizers and diffusers, the homonymous liquid crystal layer for turning pixels on and off, and a color filter. A single LCD light source for the entire screen (sometimes “zones” of light with local dimming) means that LCDs cannot match the high contrast of the OLED, where each pixel is also its own light source. OLEDs can turn off pixel light sources individually, so “black” can be really black, with the screen producing no light.
OLED video from CES 2021 Samsung laptop.
OLEDs do have some problems, however. They have less power consumption while displaying darker colors (great for dark mode advocates), but the overall power consumption on the first OLED laptop screens was quite high. Samsung’s OLED Chromebook was famous for having terrible battery life. Samsung has this problem solved on smaller phone panels, so give the company some time.
Another potential problem is burn-in, to which OLED panels are susceptible over time. Windows laptops are not expected to have the constant motion that OLED TVs have, with items like the taskbar, icons and browser tabs, all remaining in the same place day after day. A 2018 study of smartphone OLED screens showed burning effects occurring as early as 5pm. Although it is crazy to have a smartphone app open for so long, I have guides with more than 17 hours open now on my laptop. The Windows Start button will likely mark thousands of hours on the screen in a year or two, which is a real problem considering the longer replacement cycle for laptops compared to smartphones.
There are a few 60 Hz OLED laptops out there today, but not many. Samsung’s last big attempt was with the Samsung Galaxy 2020 Chromebook, which had an eye-popping 4K OLED screen on a $ 1,000 Chrome OS laptop. A year later, the company decided that such an expensive Chromebook was not a good idea and switched back to a lower priced LCD in this year’s version. OLED screens smaller than 12 inches also appear regularly in the Samsung tablet line.
At CES 2021, Samsung released a promotional video about the company’s OLED laptop screens, promising sub-monitor cameras, 50% thinner panels compared to an LCD, a 30% reduction in weight and finer settings.