So, kind of like an LCD but with [number of pixels] amount of local backlight dimming available? At least to me, reading this article, the QDCC seems like the crystals in LCDs and the OLEDs are providing the backlight. This should eliminate burn in, give us basically full array local dimming, but will not have as fast a pixel response time as plain OLED. Right? Seems good enough to replace LCDs with LED backlights as an intermediate step, though.
It's the same as current WOLED in this respect, only using a single frequency backlight with a QD converter should result in much higher energy efficiency as well as better color saturation compared to using blue and yellow to output white then using a LCD filter. I don't see this eliminating burn-in though, frequently used diodes still age faster.
I am wondering about the burn-in issue as well. Many articles, without citing sources, claim QD-OLED will not have burn-in but since its emitter is still OLED how does this make sense?
Assuming a higher efficiency of the overall stack, each individual diode won't have to work as hard to output a given quantity of light. So, on an iso-lumen basis, the pixels should just last longer because they won't have to be driven as hard.
Even more fun is that QD's (organic) also have a wear out rate. But frankly the voting on picture quality vs lifespan has clearly gone (by means of market sales) in favor of quality. I suspect Samsung's bet here is basically the same as Nand's take on QLC. If the cost can be made low enough people won't care if it doesn't last forever, as long as it looks great. And colors should be much better than the LG method. High wavelength light however (if it leaks in any way) is bad for eyeballs however.
"High wavelength light however (if it leaks in any way) is bad for eyeballs however."
You mean high frequency (=low wavelength)? And there is nothing bad about blue light if it is indeed the light directly used to represent blue subpixels - we are adapted for it. Nobody gone blind from simply looking at blue sky which has much higher brightness than any TV.
If you're correct (I believe you are), then that's too bad. My screen is bright, used for work 10-14 hours/day, much of it with static frames etc. I guess it's quantum-dot IPS or VA panels for me for another couple of years.
It won't help vs WOLED, but against Samsung's current OLEDs it will be better because all pixels will wear out at the same rate - so (parts of) picture will get dimmer but not different color than before. Because all pixels are the same, it is also much easier to do compensation - start somewhat dimmer than maximum and increase current through lifetime.
On the flip side, you can't have bigger blue pixels than green ones because the backlight is blue for all.
@Death666Angel : I don’t know if it is correct, but indeed it is my understanding as well that is more some sort of Quantum Dot (QD) display with white OLED backlight for each pixel
I think that smartphone OLED display use RGB OLED pixels : so there are 3 sub-pixels that each independently produce the 3 primary colors Red, Green and Blue, which in theory, seems the best in terms of quality I think.
I think the very first generation of Samsung OLED TV in 2013 was using a RGB OLED technology but as it wasn’t price competitive compare to LG WRGB OLED TVs, Samsung unfortunately stop the production :(...
I would love to see flexible RGB OLED scale to TV size : it would offer the possibility to create large OLED panel that are lightweight and that should have a very good image quality, right ?
It's not WOLED backlight, it says in the article that it's blue backlight. Quantum dots aren't compatible with white backlight, they require a narrow band light source on a shorter wavelength than their output to be activated, white backlight simply results in bleeding of the other wavelengths that don't aren't absorbed by the dot.
So my understanding is that it is basically a single color (blue) OLED pixel backlight with each OLED pixel driven individually, with on top a color converter to convert the light to Red / Green / Blue (RGB). So it seems a bit similar to LG WOLED technology.
I think I would prefer a 3 RGB OLED sub-pixel (Red sub-pixel, Green sub-pixel, Blue sub-pixel) like it seems to be the case for smartphone size OLED panels : I would think that overall light efficiency should be better (no light loss in converting / filtering), and so it should be better quality and more power efficient, no ? But yes, there would be issues with aging rate of the 3 different colors...
"like it seems to be the case for smartphone size OLED panels"
Very unlikely, what is your source for that? OLED screens so far has been less efficient than even LCDs, because they use white light and filter out ~2/3rd of it.
The issue is blue OLED diodes are the least efficient among RGB, but I don't think quantum dots still pose an efficiency issue, either way they should be much more than liquid crystal filters since filters block light and quantum dots rather convert light.
QDs are the equivalent of color filters present in WOLED or all LCDs (and Samsung uses QD on their highend LCD TVs). These don't filter anything dynamically like LC matrix does in LCD, this is a static filter/converter. So, think about it as LG's WOLED TV with fancier color filters. Burn in should be the same as WOLED, plus improvements due to higher efficiency, material quality and whatever. Pixel response should be essentially the same as typical OLEDs. These QDs aren't instant in their conversion, but fast enough you shouldn't be able to notice any difference in response time to unfiltered OLED or the ones using simpler color filters.
Sure, Samsung might try to spin that in the way you propose, but it wouldn't be really true - just marketing. They went in TV game way back with OLEDs, but LG kicked them out as Samsung's solution didn't scale well - it was too expensive to manufacture. Same as Sony's. They still haven't solved their problems with that approach - it is great for mobile, but TVs are nonexistent beyond some prototypes.
@Zizy: Thanks for your explanation, it was what I meant to explain that it was a bit similar to LG WOLED but using Quantum Dot (QD) as color converter instead of using color filters.
I think I would prefer a 3 RGB OLED sub-pixel (Red sub-pixel, Green sub-pixel, Blue sub-pixel) like it seems to be the case for smartphone size OLED panels : I would think that overall light efficiency should be better (no light loss in converting / filtering), and so it should be better quality and more power efficient, no ?
But I guess it would be more expensive to produce at large area size, which may not make it cost competitive with LG WOLED...
I soooo much want a nearly bezeless laptop (like huawei Matebook X Pro / Microsoft Surface Pro 3 / Samsung Galaxy Book S) & also thin 12.5-inch tablet with the same quality OLED display as Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ : it would be sooo gorgeous !!!
Each OLED should be self-illuminating, one OLED source per sub-pixel. The quantum-dots or filters are just changing the OLED light colour to the desired red/green/blue. That gives per-pixel lighting. LCD has a single backlight for the entire screen - or in costly devices this is split up into backlighting zones, but that's clearly not as good as this.
The fact they're doing this suggests that microLED displays are going to be further off than we hoped, at least for larger screen sizes.
Not at all, more like a CRT, only instead of beams of electrons the luminescence is activated by beams of blue light, with one emitter per subpixel instead of one emitter per color.
I never would have thought Samsung was going to go the OLED route given their huge push for QLED and microLED tech. I honestly believed they were going to leapfrog past OLED onwards to microLED. Guess LG is now thoroughly screwed in this realm too.
Exactly. They have been doing that forever and said time and time again that OLED doesn't make sense for a TV because of the burn in issues. That was the main reason why Plasma died out.
Plasma was abandoned because Japanese couldn't make 4K plasma panels when the Koreans flooded the market with 4K LCD TV long before any 4K content was available. Japanese was also late in pushing 4K LCD. That strategic mistake more than anything else, not plasma burn-in, shifted the TV market dominance from the Japanese to the Koreans.
Yeah as far as I understand it, this is basically WOLED from LG, but using quantum dot filtering instead of the more standard filtering that LG uses. Not sure it if will be better or worse, but at least we will finally have strong competition in the area in 2 years.
From what I read elsewhere, it's not WOLED with QD filters. It's blue OLED using QD filters. Production savings is in using blue OLED instead of white, but using blue OLED also has more engineering challenges in producing colors.
At least with a single OLED colour emitter you will get even burn in. The old R/G/B OLED systems had different burn in rates for the different colours. Hence WOLED and similar display technologies for TVs that need to last 5-10 years, rather than the 2-3 years for mobile phones.
The burn-in won’t be even between colours because the sub pixels are still dedicated to specific colours. You’d burn through your red sub pixels faster if you left CNN on all day long, for example.
Not sure where you are getting this, since there is no LCD layer or anything like that.
Every pixel is individually driven by an OLED (or multiple OLEDs even for the sub-pixels), just like any old OLED display we have right now.
The entire concept is quite similar to what LG uses to make their OLED TVs today (single color OLEDs with color filters), just with a different implementation that promises better efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
They work almost exactly the same as every OLED television currently on the market. They still have the same advantages as an R/G/B OLED panel, only with a hit to power efficiency. Ultimately not a concern in a TV.
It is certainly not a filter. You cannot just filter red light out of blue light.
"Quantum dot" term for this particular application is of course a marketing BS. The pixels are nowhere near the quantum sizes and it is the case of simple photoluminescence (not unlike cat piss under UV "black" light).
The term “quantum” in quantum dot refers to the particles themselves (as small as 2nm) and the way their optical properties differ from larger particles due to quantum effects. It’s not a marketing term (not originally, anyway, they’ve been called that since the 1980s) and not inaccurate.
Key question for me is: will this prevent of strongly reduce the risk of burn-in. Burn-in is the key reason why I don't use an OLED screen as my main display. So, are the quantum dots alleviating that vulnerability?
Quantum Dots are partikels smaller than 1 u. They trap the blue lght, accumulatie energy and send a photon of lower frequeny out. They act Just as a phosphor but with better performance. There is a multitude of quantum Dots per pixel. Quantum Dots, if not embedded in some layer pose a health risk due to their small size
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
42 Comments
Back to Article
Death666Angel - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
So, kind of like an LCD but with [number of pixels] amount of local backlight dimming available? At least to me, reading this article, the QDCC seems like the crystals in LCDs and the OLEDs are providing the backlight. This should eliminate burn in, give us basically full array local dimming, but will not have as fast a pixel response time as plain OLED. Right? Seems good enough to replace LCDs with LED backlights as an intermediate step, though.s.yu - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
It's the same as current WOLED in this respect, only using a single frequency backlight with a QD converter should result in much higher energy efficiency as well as better color saturation compared to using blue and yellow to output white then using a LCD filter. I don't see this eliminating burn-in though, frequently used diodes still age faster.wr3zzz - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
I am wondering about the burn-in issue as well. Many articles, without citing sources, claim QD-OLED will not have burn-in but since its emitter is still OLED how does this make sense?boeush - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
Assuming a higher efficiency of the overall stack, each individual diode won't have to work as hard to output a given quantity of light. So, on an iso-lumen basis, the pixels should just last longer because they won't have to be driven as hard.s.yu - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
I see, of course that makes sense, nowhere near burn-in free, just equivalent to the burn-in at a lower brightness.FXi - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Even more fun is that QD's (organic) also have a wear out rate. But frankly the voting on picture quality vs lifespan has clearly gone (by means of market sales) in favor of quality. I suspect Samsung's bet here is basically the same as Nand's take on QLC. If the cost can be made low enough people won't care if it doesn't last forever, as long as it looks great. And colors should be much better than the LG method. High wavelength light however (if it leaks in any way) is bad for eyeballs however.peevee - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
"High wavelength light however (if it leaks in any way) is bad for eyeballs however."You mean high frequency (=low wavelength)?
And there is nothing bad about blue light if it is indeed the light directly used to represent blue subpixels - we are adapted for it. Nobody gone blind from simply looking at blue sky which has much higher brightness than any TV.
eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
If you're correct (I believe you are), then that's too bad. My screen is bright, used for work 10-14 hours/day, much of it with static frames etc. I guess it's quantum-dot IPS or VA panels for me for another couple of years.Zizy - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
It won't help vs WOLED, but against Samsung's current OLEDs it will be better because all pixels will wear out at the same rate - so (parts of) picture will get dimmer but not different color than before. Because all pixels are the same, it is also much easier to do compensation - start somewhat dimmer than maximum and increase current through lifetime.On the flip side, you can't have bigger blue pixels than green ones because the backlight is blue for all.
Diogene7 - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
@Death666Angel : I don’t know if it is correct, but indeed it is my understanding as well that is more some sort of Quantum Dot (QD) display with white OLED backlight for each pixelI think that smartphone OLED display use RGB OLED pixels : so there are 3 sub-pixels that each independently produce the 3 primary colors Red, Green and Blue, which in theory, seems the best in terms of quality I think.
I think the very first generation of Samsung OLED TV in 2013 was using a RGB OLED technology but as it wasn’t price competitive compare to LG WRGB OLED TVs, Samsung unfortunately stop the production :(...
I would love to see flexible RGB OLED scale to TV size : it would offer the possibility to create large OLED panel that are lightweight and that should have a very good image quality, right ?
s.yu - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
It's not WOLED backlight, it says in the article that it's blue backlight. Quantum dots aren't compatible with white backlight, they require a narrow band light source on a shorter wavelength than their output to be activated, white backlight simply results in bleeding of the other wavelengths that don't aren't absorbed by the dot.Diogene7 - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
@s.yu : Thanks for the clarification.So my understanding is that it is basically a single color (blue) OLED pixel backlight with each OLED pixel driven individually, with on top a color converter to convert the light to Red / Green / Blue (RGB). So it seems a bit similar to LG WOLED technology.
I think I would prefer a 3 RGB OLED sub-pixel (Red sub-pixel, Green sub-pixel, Blue sub-pixel) like it seems to be the case for smartphone size OLED panels : I would think that overall light efficiency should be better (no light loss in converting / filtering), and so it should be better quality and more power efficient, no ? But yes, there would be issues with aging rate of the 3 different colors...
peevee - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
"like it seems to be the case for smartphone size OLED panels"Very unlikely, what is your source for that? OLED screens so far has been less efficient than even LCDs, because they use white light and filter out ~2/3rd of it.
s.yu - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
The issue is blue OLED diodes are the least efficient among RGB, but I don't think quantum dots still pose an efficiency issue, either way they should be much more than liquid crystal filters since filters block light and quantum dots rather convert light.Zizy - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Nope.QDs are the equivalent of color filters present in WOLED or all LCDs (and Samsung uses QD on their highend LCD TVs). These don't filter anything dynamically like LC matrix does in LCD, this is a static filter/converter. So, think about it as LG's WOLED TV with fancier color filters.
Burn in should be the same as WOLED, plus improvements due to higher efficiency, material quality and whatever. Pixel response should be essentially the same as typical OLEDs. These QDs aren't instant in their conversion, but fast enough you shouldn't be able to notice any difference in response time to unfiltered OLED or the ones using simpler color filters.
Blaab1 - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
But does this mean that Samsung was waiting for an improved OLED tech to get into the TV game?Zizy - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Sure, Samsung might try to spin that in the way you propose, but it wouldn't be really true - just marketing.They went in TV game way back with OLEDs, but LG kicked them out as Samsung's solution didn't scale well - it was too expensive to manufacture. Same as Sony's. They still haven't solved their problems with that approach - it is great for mobile, but TVs are nonexistent beyond some prototypes.
Death666Angel - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Got it, thanks! :)Diogene7 - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
@Zizy: Thanks for your explanation, it was what I meant to explain that it was a bit similar to LG WOLED but using Quantum Dot (QD) as color converter instead of using color filters.I think I would prefer a 3 RGB OLED sub-pixel (Red sub-pixel, Green sub-pixel, Blue sub-pixel) like it seems to be the case for smartphone size OLED panels : I would think that overall light efficiency should be better (no light loss in converting / filtering), and so it should be better quality and more power efficient, no ?
But I guess it would be more expensive to produce at large area size, which may not make it cost competitive with LG WOLED...
I soooo much want a nearly bezeless laptop (like huawei Matebook X Pro / Microsoft Surface Pro 3 / Samsung Galaxy Book S) & also thin 12.5-inch tablet with the same quality OLED display as Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ : it would be sooo gorgeous !!!
psychobriggsy - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Each OLED should be self-illuminating, one OLED source per sub-pixel. The quantum-dots or filters are just changing the OLED light colour to the desired red/green/blue. That gives per-pixel lighting. LCD has a single backlight for the entire screen - or in costly devices this is split up into backlighting zones, but that's clearly not as good as this.The fact they're doing this suggests that microLED displays are going to be further off than we hoped, at least for larger screen sizes.
nevcairiel - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Actually the problem with microLEDs is the opposite - its harder for smaller screen sizes since getting the density is the problem.They can make a 100-inch display with a relatively low resolution (for that screen size) no problem, but a 60 inch at 4K, thats too much density.
peevee - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
"So, kind of like an LCD"Not at all, more like a CRT, only instead of beams of electrons the luminescence is activated by beams of blue light, with one emitter per subpixel instead of one emitter per color.
s.yu - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Oh yeah, much like a CRT.quiksilvr - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
I never would have thought Samsung was going to go the OLED route given their huge push for QLED and microLED tech. I honestly believed they were going to leapfrog past OLED onwards to microLED. Guess LG is now thoroughly screwed in this realm too.nathanddrews - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
You mean like how they have been pushing OLED for mobile devices for nearly a decade?quiksilvr - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Exactly. They have been doing that forever and said time and time again that OLED doesn't make sense for a TV because of the burn in issues. That was the main reason why Plasma died out.peevee - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
I have 2 plasma TVs, one (Panasonic) is >>10 y/o, and no burn in.Plasma TV died out because their production costs are much higher than LCDs, and the market is price-sensitive.
s.yu - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
And very inefficient...wr3zzz - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Plasma was abandoned because Japanese couldn't make 4K plasma panels when the Koreans flooded the market with 4K LCD TV long before any 4K content was available. Japanese was also late in pushing 4K LCD. That strategic mistake more than anything else, not plasma burn-in, shifted the TV market dominance from the Japanese to the Koreans.lilkwarrior - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Numbers don't lie: OLED dominates high-end panel sales, especially TVs (Samsung dominates the lower-end TV market).It only makes sense Samsung does this.
Alistair - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
Yeah as far as I understand it, this is basically WOLED from LG, but using quantum dot filtering instead of the more standard filtering that LG uses. Not sure it if will be better or worse, but at least we will finally have strong competition in the area in 2 years.wr3zzz - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
From what I read elsewhere, it's not WOLED with QD filters. It's blue OLED using QD filters. Production savings is in using blue OLED instead of white, but using blue OLED also has more engineering challenges in producing colors.psychobriggsy - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
At least with a single OLED colour emitter you will get even burn in. The old R/G/B OLED systems had different burn in rates for the different colours. Hence WOLED and similar display technologies for TVs that need to last 5-10 years, rather than the 2-3 years for mobile phones.Guspaz - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
The burn-in won’t be even between colours because the sub pixels are still dedicated to specific colours. You’d burn through your red sub pixels faster if you left CNN on all day long, for example.James5mith - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
As long as they don't try to sell them as OLED TVs/Displays I'm fine with it.This is backlight technology, not panel technology.
nevcairiel - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Not sure where you are getting this, since there is no LCD layer or anything like that.Every pixel is individually driven by an OLED (or multiple OLEDs even for the sub-pixels), just like any old OLED display we have right now.
The entire concept is quite similar to what LG uses to make their OLED TVs today (single color OLEDs with color filters), just with a different implementation that promises better efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Guspaz - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
They work almost exactly the same as every OLED television currently on the market. They still have the same advantages as an R/G/B OLED panel, only with a hit to power efficiency. Ultimately not a concern in a TV.peevee - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
"with a quantum dot RGB color filter"It is certainly not a filter. You cannot just filter red light out of blue light.
"Quantum dot" term for this particular application is of course a marketing BS. The pixels are nowhere near the quantum sizes and it is the case of simple photoluminescence (not unlike cat piss under UV "black" light).
Guspaz - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
The term “quantum” in quantum dot refers to the particles themselves (as small as 2nm) and the way their optical properties differ from larger particles due to quantum effects. It’s not a marketing term (not originally, anyway, they’ve been called that since the 1980s) and not inaccurate.eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Key question for me is: will this prevent of strongly reduce the risk of burn-in. Burn-in is the key reason why I don't use an OLED screen as my main display. So, are the quantum dots alleviating that vulnerability?GullenC - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Quantum Dots are partikels smaller than 1 u. They trap the blue lght, accumulatie energy and send a photon of lower frequeny out. They act Just as a phosphor but with better performance. There is a multitude of quantum Dots per pixel. Quantum Dots, if not embedded in some layer pose a health risk due to their small sizenevcairiel - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
No, Quantum Dots have no direct impact on the burn-in. But increased efficiency of future OLEDs should help to greatly reduce the problem.