Samsung Shows R&D Prototype Of A MicroLED Display That Can Bulge And Bend
August 27, 2024 by Dave Haynes
Samsung’s R&D team showed off a prototype last week at a Korean display nerds conference of a microLED display that is stretchable, capable of bulging by as much as 25% more than its normal size and state.
The demo was at the International Meeting on Information Display (iMID 2024) conference, which looks like a more Korea-specific variation on the SID’s annual Display Week display nerd conference and trade show in California.
Samsung has been talking up its development of stretchable microLED for a while now, but iMID is thought to be the first time a prototype has had a more public demo.
The display has 120 pixels per inch, and is described as the highest resolution stretchable display ever demonstrated, and having the highest “elongation rate” – which I assume means stretchiness. The display appears to have the form of a rubbery, floppy film.
Korean rivals LG Display demo’d a 100 PPI stretchable microLED display back in 2022
In both cases, these are products likely years and years away from commercial availability, and just like foldable screens, there’s a bit of solution-looking-for-a-problem happening here.
Samsung in earlier reports had also been working on stretchable OLED, and given OLED is a core product for LG, it is not a reach to think it has done the same with OLED. This LG video gets into potential applications for stretchable, and almost all of it involves wearables of some sort. LG’s big thing at the show was its META Technology 2.0 – a Micro Lens Array Plus (MLA+) that has and does whatever this means: an astounding 424 billion ultra-fine lens patterns, along with the ‘META Multi Booster’ brightness optimization algorithm and the ‘Detail Enhancer’ image quality booster.
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