LG Electronics has been pushing OLED as the future of commercial signage displays, but its plans may be scuppered by Samsung Electronics, which has come up with an alternative that consumes almost no energy at all - at least when it’s showing a static image.
The company is using the same technology common in e-readers like the Amazon Kindle. It’s known as e-paper, and it has traditionally always been limited to just black and white. That, of course, is absolutely okay when displaying books, but for most other applications it doesn’t quite cut it. Hence, the arrival of a new generation of colour e-paper displays.
Like black-and-white e-paper, colour e-paper is a reflective display technology that uses ambient light to create its images, as opposed to the emissive tech that we see in OLED, or the transmissive displays made from LCD.
The advantage of this is that e-paper consumes far less energy than other kinds of displays. Once it generates a static image, power consumption falls to less than 0.005 watts, which is so low that Samsung can specify it as being zero watts, based on the International Electrotechnical Commission's IEC62301 standard. The only time the energy output increases is when the image that’s displayed on the screen is changed to something new.
The disadvantage of e-paper is that it’s not really that useful for things such as movies, as that requires a constant stream of energy. In addition, the technology cannot match the wide colour palette and the high dynamic range and contrast and other characteristics found in technologies like OLED. The refresh rate is also much lower.
But even so, Samsung seems to think there might be a market for static visuals, and is launching an entire range of coloured e-paper displays for commercial applications.
The displays come in 13-inches, 25-inches, 32-inches and 75-inches, with the largest size also said to be suitable for outdoor usage, the company said. Because they don’t require multiple layers like emissive and transmissive displays do, they are incredibly thin compared to such products.
According to Samsung, each of its new coloured e-paper displays comes with a rechargeable 5000 mAh battery, which should ensure it can go on for days without needing to be recharged, and there are a pair of USB-C ports to handle charging and data transfer. They’re also equipped with 8 gigabytes of memory and can connect to content sources over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
There’s a companion smartphone application for users to manage what they’re showing on the displays, and they can be integrated with other systems through an API in the Tizen operating system.
The new products may well go down well in some industries, but there’s a long way to go before the technology might be considered suitable enough for a product such as The Frame, Samsung’s iconic TV that doubles as a digital art display.
Then again, who knows what the company might come up with in future, for it’s said to be researching possibilities for a new technology called Reflective LCD or RLCD, which combines e-paper with LCD.
