Seeing into the future – foldable screens and rolling displays

At the Society for Information Display (SID) Display Week 2022 – the world’s largest conference dedicated to displays, held in San Jose, California last week – South Korean tech giants Samsung and LG caused a stir with their presentation of revolutionary foldable screens that could, in the coming years, be used on high-end smartphones.

Last year, Samsung generated headlines with the release of the Galaxy Z Fold3 and Flip3.

While sales figures have not yet been made public, Samsung says it increased its sales of folding smartphones fourfold in 2020 and 2021.

But at more than R16 000, they are still a niche market.

And it appears the South Korean manufacturer wants to continue experimenting with other formats in the future.

It unveiled two new technologies designed to make life easier for customers in a few years’ time in the form of screens that can be folded in three or that slide.

The first idea is a prototype of a smartphone with a tri-fold screen – a double folding system, inwards and outwards.

Its “expandable” screens would unfold and then retract horizontally or vertically.

Samsung is not the first to propose this type of concept, which, for the moment, has not yet made its way to a product on the market.

Its main competitor, LG, is also looking at new display styles, with its presentation of an eight-inch touchscreen that can fold inwards or outwards and a 17-inch foldable screen for PCs.

The latter should soon be used by Asus.

Such technologies could also be used in the future for other devices, such as game consoles, car dashboard displays or TV sets.