Gather round, friends, for a quick tech lesson.
If you haven’t already, you’re going to hear quite a bit this year about LCD and OLED technology.
Now you could just do that knowing head nod thing if it ever comes up in conversation, or you could actually find out the difference and illustrate your intelligence the second the opportunity presents itself.
You’re going for the latter, aren’t you?
Here to help us make the distinction is Trusted Reviews, with some of the basics first:
Two display types that can be found across monitors, TVs, mobile phones, cameras and pretty much any other device sporting a screen.
In one corner is LED (light-emitting diode). It’s by far the most common type of display on the market, and it features in all kinds of tech. However, it might be unfamiliar to you because there’s slight labelling confusion with LCD (liquid crystal display).
For display purposes, the two are the same. If you see a TV or smartphone that states it has an ‘LED’ screen, it’s actually an LCD. The LED part just refers to the lighting source, not the display itself.
Then there’s OLED (organic light-emitting diode), which is used in high-end flagship phones such as the iPhone X and newly revealed iPhone XS.
Right, let’s get to the key differences:
In a nutshell, LED LCD screens use a backlight to illuminate their pixels, while OLED’s pixels actually produce their own light. You might hear OLED’s pixels called ‘emissive’, while LCD tech is ‘transmissive’.
The light of an OLED display can be controlled on a pixel-by-pixel basis. This sort of dexterity just isn’t possible with an LED LCD…
In cheaper TVs and LCD-screen phones, LED LCD displays tend to use ‘edge lighting’, where LEDs actually sit to the side of the display, not right behind it. The light from these LEDs is then fired through a matrix that feeds it through the red, green and blue pixels and into our eyes.
Err, you got that?
Look, they break it down in great detail here, but let’s skip ahead to the ‘which is better’ question:
LED LCD has been around for much longer and it’s cheaper to make, which gives it a head start when it comes to market saturation. However, OLED is an excellent luxury option, and OLED technology is gaining momentum. OLED is already much better than LED LCD at handling darkness and lighting precision.
So OLED is luxury, and who doesn’t want to go with that option?
When it comes to Apple, and what lies ahead for the iPhone, it looks like OLED is winning the battle.
This from 9to5Mac:
Apple is purportedly looking to drop LCD screens from its iPhone lineup, starting with the 2020 iPhone. This year’s iPhone XR successor would be the last flagship LCD model…
The move to OLED will enable “more flexible handset design”, hinting at an ambitious 2020 iPhone roadmap. We already see this somewhat today with the iPhone XR featuring larger bezels than its OLED counterparts.
…It is likely that the 2020 iPhone design is a radical departure from what we know today. The 2019 iPhone chassis is expected to be more of an iterative change.
According to the leaks that we have already covered, we are set for a “radical new iPhone”. OLED is far more adept at allowing for that creativity in design:
LCD has fallen out of fashion in the last few years primarily because it requires a standalone backlight component. The pixels of an OLED screen are individually lit, allowing them to be used in devices with more irregular shapes.
‘Individually lit’ sounds like something a wannabe 18-year-old influencer talks about in their Instagram stories, with a whole bunch of flame emojis splashed across the screen.
Thankfully, when it comes to iPhones, it should be far less annoying.
We will have to wait until the latter half of the year before we get a proper look at the new Apple products. If you want to get your hands on what’s on offer now, including the full range of iPhones, iPods and Apple Watches, pop over to Digicape.
Good luck with your LCD versus OLED lecture, too.
[sources:trustedreviews&9to5mac]
