San Francisco (CA) - Think your shiny new cellphone has a crisp display? Think again. Samsung is first to demonstrate actual VGA resolution on a cellphone-sized 1.98" display. Samsung says that the display shows ten times more detail than your average 40" high definition LCD TV.
The company showed the displayed at the currently held Society for Information Display International Conference and Exhibition (SID 2006) tradeshow in San Francisco and created some hope that some high-quality mobile phone screens are coming our way. According to Samsung the amorphous silicon (a-Si) TFT-LCD is the first 1.98" panel to achieve VGA resolution and display a total of 307,200 pixels (640x480 pixels) on its screen area.
The manufacturer said that the LCD is capable of running at a pixel density of 400 pixels per inch (ppi), which is about ten times the 40 ppi density of a typical 40" HD LCD TV. 400 ppi translates into a picture clarity that can show visual details as small as 63 microns, which is about half the width of a human hair.
In real life applications, Samsung expects mobile phones equipped with this new display to be able to show Windows screens and documents with the same VGA quality that is provided by most desktop or notebook PCs today. Besides higher resolution, the screen also shows up to 16 million colors and can cope with "extremely fast data transmission rates required today," Samsung said. The brightness of the 1.98" panel is rated at 250 nits, the contrast ratio at 300:1. Samsung did not say when it will be ready to mass-produce its mini VGA panel.