The world’s first-ever 500Hz LCD panel has been revealed by China’s BOE, enabling the fastest refresh rate ever seen on an LCD computer monitor.
BOE said it created the panel by switching to oxide thin film transistors – a technology it has previously used to create one of the world’s first 120Hz 8K panels.
The new display was first reported on by the Chinese language website Sina, which described the 27-inch full HD monitor panel as 500Hz+, which appears to indicate it could possibly achieve even higher refresh rates.
A translation of Sina's story by Wccf Tech says BOE confirmed the panel offers the highest refresh rate ever seen in an LCD display, surpassing the 360Hz monitors that debuted in 2020. For now though the panel is still just a prototype, so we’ll have to wait a while before any products actually go on sale.
BOE said it built the 500Hz full HD LCD panel by switching from amorphous silicon, which enables higher resolution, to oxide for the TFT backplane. It explained that switching to oxide allows it to increase both the resolution and the refresh rate.
According to BOE, oxide semicondutor display technology has advantages such as higher mobility, low off-state current, a simple process tech and large size. Those qualities mean it can meet the dual requirements of high quality improvement and low energy usage, BOE continued.
There do appear to be some kinks BOE has to iron out before it can commercialize the 500Hz panel tech:
“In the industrialization of oxide technology, the instability of the traditional oxide film microstructure under bias stress, light, high current and other unstable problems such as device performance attenuation, as well as copper process and oxide process matching problems, are common problems that need to be solved urgently in the semiconductor display industry,” the company explained.
That said, it’s not immediately clear if a 500Hz panel will actually be of any benefit. While the display can refresh itself 500 times a second, the response time of the LCD panel could well be a limiting factor.
