Jargon buster: LTPS, IPS LCD, AMOLED display explained
Display technologies in use today concentrate on two major factors — picture quality, power consumption
The world of smartphones has been busy for the past few months, launching numerous innovative offerings. In the midst of cutting-edge processors and exceptional camera sensors, the display has been the focus for all the prominent players present in the mobile phone industry this year.
Samsung came up with its unique 18:5:9 AMOLED display for the Galaxy S8. LG picked up its old trusted IPS LCD unit for the G6’s display. These display units have been familiar to the usual Indian smartphone buyer. Huawei’s Honor, on the other hand, has just unveiled the new Honor 8 Pro for the Indian market that ships with a 2K LTPS LCD display. This fancy term has led people to wonder the benefits of the technology for Honor to craft its flagship smartphone with.
The LCD technology brought in the era of thin displays to screens, making the smartphone possible in the current world. LCD displays are power efficient and work on the principle of blocking and passing light. The liquid crystal in the display unit uses some kind of a backlight, generally an LED with a reflector, to make the picture visible. There are two kinds of LCD units — a passive matrix LCD that requires more power and the superior active matrix LCD unit, known to people as Thin Film Transistor (TFT) that draws less power.
However, the early LCD technology couldn’t maintain the colour for wide angle viewing, which led to the development of the In-Plane Switching (IPS) LCD panel. IPS panel arranges and switches the orientation of the liquid crystal molecules of between the glass substrates. This helps it to enhance viewing angles and improve colour reproduction as well. IPS LCD technology is responsible for accelerating the growth of the smartphone market and is the go-to display technology for prominent smartphone manufacturers.
The standard LCD display uses amorphous Silicon as the liquid for the display unit as it can be assembled into complex high-current driver circuits. This though restricts the display resolution and adds to overall device temperatures. Therefore, development of the technology led to replacing the amorphous Silicon coupled with Polycrystalline Silicon, which boosted the screen resolution and maintains low temperatures. The larger and more uniform grains of PolySilicon allow faster electron movement, resulting in higher resolution and higher refresh rates. It is also cheaper to manufacture due to lower cost of certain key substrates. Therefore, the LowTemperature PolySilicon (LTPS) LCD screen helps provide larger pixel densities, lower power consumption than standard LCDs and controlled temperature ranges.
The AMOLED display technology is in a completely different league. It doesn’t bother with any liquid mechanism or complex grid structures. The panel uses an array of tiny organic LEDs placed on TFT modules. These LEDs have an organic construction that directly emit light and minimises its loss by eradicating certain filters. Since LEDs are physically different units, they can be asked to switch on and off as per the requirement of the display to form a picture. This is known as the Active Matrix system. Hence, an Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode (AMOLED) display can produce deeper blacks by switching off individual LED pixels, resulting in high contrast pictures.
Now, all of that boils down to the final question — which one’s better? The honest answer is that it depends on the requirement of the user. If you want accurate colours from your display while wanting it to retain its vibrancy for a longer period of time, then any of the two LCD screens are the ideal choice. LTPS LCD display can provide higher picture resolution but deteriorates faster than standard IPS LCD display over time. An AMOLED display will provide high contrast pictures any time but it too has the tendency to deteriorate faster than LCD panels. Therefore, if you are after greater picture quality, choose LTPS LCD or else settle for AMOLED for a vivid contrast picture experience.