What is an AMOLED display

We have always come across phones using AMOLED displays. The flagship phones of Apple, Samsung, or Oneplus have AMOLED displays in it. Those displays are gorgeous and worth the price paid. There are TVs with OLED Panels today, and they look fantastic. But what is an AMOLED display? what makes AMOLED special? Read on.

What is an AMOLED display and what makes AMOLED special?

Self-emissive

AMOLED stands for Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode. It uses organic elements to produce light as oppose to LCD-LED television, which uses LED to generate light source. Hence, OLEDs are self-emissive display. 

An AMOLED consists of an Organic active layer sandwiched between a layer of a cathode and two layers of TFT. The TFT consists of one layer of the capacitor to store the charge and another one layer, which actually switches the organic layer. Therefore, they produce light on their own. Each pixel consists of three subpixels of red, blue, and green. Since it is a self-emissive display, it can produce stable red, blue and green light. As a result, the light produced will be accurate. The emitted color is brilliant, accurate, and bright. These make AMOLED special.

Contrast ratio

Contrast ratio is the ratio between the brightest luminance of any pixel to its darkest illuminance. Since OLEDs can turn off completely, the ratio becomes infinity. Therefore, OLED can be said as it has an infinity contrast ratio. How does it translate to the day to day life? Well, the answer is a beautiful display. The picture appears saturated and true to life. The colors are punchy. With an infinite contrast ratio, blacks appear black and not grey. With high contrast, it appears that the image pops off the screen.

Brightness

The brightness of OLED is good to very bright. The OLED in iPhone 11 Pro is capable of delivering 1200 nits of brightness. This makes the HDR playback excellent. The shadow details are preserved. The highlight speckles are beautifully rendered. This brightness makes AMOLED special.

High refresh rate

A high refresh rate display makes the image much sweeter to watch, and it has judder-free motion. Since AMOLED is self-emissive and capable of instant and complete on and off, the panels with Amoled can be clocked to very high refresh rates yielding butter-smooth performance.

Size

Since the AMOLED displays are self-emissive, it doesn’t need a backlight to function well. This means AMOLED can be manufactured with less thickness. Also, The capacitive touch can be printed on top of the OLED layer; it becomes much thinner compared to the LCD-LED models. This makes the overall size of the phone thinner.

Foldable display

OLEDs are self-emissive by nature and also can be manufactured in very thin sheets; they can be used for foldable displays. It has already appeared in Samsung’s foldable displays and proves its worth. This is one of the key features that makes AMOLED special.

Flaws of AMOLED

The AMOLED display has a shorter life span compared to the traditional LCD-LED panel. 

Another issue is that it is susceptible to increased burn-in in static image areas of the screen.

Conclusion

Amoled makes an awesome technology to view contents. The self-emissive display has its own advantages, and fluid-like motion ensures in the high refresh rate display ensures that the viewers are viewing the best of the image possible. With the foldable display, it is easy to integrate into new flexible tablets and phones. Be it for image quality or contrast or foldability; the display is worth it with all the features in hand. All these make AMOLED special.

Thanks for reading.