Samsung makes ‘very large quantities’ of 90Hz OLED screens for laptops

The world’s largest OLED manufacturer is pushing for more OLED laptops. A press release from Samsung Display said in March that the company “makes very large quantities of 90-inch 90-inch OLED screens for laptops and notebooks.” Apparently Samsung has a lot of orders coming in, and the company says that “several international IT companies are expected to release new laptops or notebooks with 90Hz OLED screens this year.”

Usually, faster refresh rate displays are the richness of gaming laptops, where you can get anywhere from 90Hz to a dazzling 300Hz (it sounds like too much), but these are all LCDs. Thanks to Samsung, OLEDs have completely taken over smartphones, with the company providing panels to Apple, Google, its own Galaxy line, OnePlus, and almost everyone. On many Android phones, these are 90Hz or 120Hz screens, and it now sounds like Samsung is ready to scale up on laptops.

OLED screens are a grid of organic, light emitting material (this electrified pickle video is a good explanation) and are usually thinner and less complicated than LCDs. LCDs need a lot of layers – a backlight to illuminate the screen, different layers of polarizers and diffusers, the so-called liquid crystal layer to turn pixels in and out, and a color filter. The single source of a full-screen LCD (sometimes ‘zones’ of light with local eclipse) means that LCDs do not match the high contrast of OLED, where each pixel is also its own light source. OLEDs can turn off pixel sources separately, so that ‘black’ can be really black, without the screen producing any light.

However, OLEDs have some issues. They have lower power consumption while displaying darker colors (ideal for advocates in the dark mode), but the overall power consumption on early OLED laptops was quite high. Samsung’s OLED Chromebook was notorious for having a terrible battery life. However, Samsung has leaked this issue on smaller phone panels, so give the company some time.

Another possible problem is the burn-in, over which OLED panels are susceptible over time. Windows laptops are not expected to have the constant motion that OLED TVs have, with things like the taskbar, icons, and browser pages staying in the same place day after day. A 2018 study of OLED screens for smartphones showed that the burn-in effects occur as early as 17 hours. While it would be crazy to keep a smartphone app open for so long, I currently have tabs open on my laptop. The window test button is likely to clock on the screen in a year or two thousand hours, which is a real problem as the longer replacement cycle of laptops is compared to smartphones.

There are a few 60Hz OLED laptops today, but not many. Samsung’s last major effort was with the 2020 Samsung Galaxy Chromebook, featuring a striking 4K OLED screen in a $ 1000 Chrome OS laptop. A year later, the company decided that such an expensive Chromebook was not a great idea, and switched to an LCD and a lower price in this year’s version. Smaller 12-inch OLED screens also appear regularly on Samsung’s tablet range.

At CES 2021, Samsung posted a promotional video about the company’s OLED laptops, promising cameras under the screen, 50 percent thinner panels compared to an LCD, a 30 percent weight reduction and slimmer edges.