‘Samsung and LG can provide cheaper smartphones with AMOLED screens’

Samsung and LG can provide cheaper smartphones with AMOLED screens in the coming years. DisplaySearch claims that based on recent developments in the production of amoled screens. Only Samsung and LG produce amoled screens for phones.

The fact that amoled screens could be used more often in cheap phones could be because the yields in the production of amoled screens are rising, which could lead to the production costs being lower than that of LCDs, DisplaySearch says. At the moment, it is still sixteen percent more expensive to make a 5″ full-HD AMOLED screen than an LCD with the same characteristics.

At the moment only Samsung uses amoled screens in cheap devices. Models such as the Galaxy S4 mini and Galaxy S5 mini are equipped with amoled panels. LG only uses its AMOLED screens in its curved phone G Flex for the time being. Sometimes other manufacturers also use amoled screens, such as Motorola and Nokia.

AMOLED screens offer a higher contrast than LCDs and are also thinner, so that phones can be thinner as a whole or can be equipped with larger batteries without being thicker. How cheap amoled phones could become is not made clear by DisplaySearch. It is also unknown whether the production capacity of AMOLED screens is sufficient to provide many more devices with AMOLED screens.

Difference between an amoled screen (left) and an LCD on a mobile device. Because the device can turn off pixels individually, black is a perfect black, whereas with LCDs it looks dark blue or grayish.