Allan D. Francisco
I have been intimate with quite a number of mobile phones, most of them of different models and brands. But before some kidnap, er…hospitality-for-a-fee groups have any funny idea and start inviting me for a less-than-voluntary stay within their premises and facilities, I wish to make it clear that I have not purchased or bought those handsets with my own money. All those handsets were handed to me by my editor, who let me use them in exchange for at least a thousand garbled words that could pass for a review article.
Anyway, I consider myself extremely lucky for the chance to use those mobile handsets and other electronics devices even before their manufacturers or distributors would introduce them in the market
Most of those handsets performed as well as advertised by their manufacturers. They came in various shapes, sizes and configurations. Some were candybar-shaped, while the others took after some forms of clamshells. Some had a digital camera, while others sported an MP3 player. A number of them had all of these features and all the other contraptions a design engineer worth his salt could come up with.
Yet almost all of them, from the lowliest entry-level handset to the fanciest multi-function mobile phone models, had this common shortcoming—a display that would lose its brilliance once exposed to direct sunlight. Those handsets might have come with displays boasting of the highest resolution, the best color saturation, but once outdoors, their LCDs went kaput.
Like a neophyte legislator scampering away from nosy reporters after being discovered for the first time doing hanky panky with his or her CDF, those mobile phones’ LCDs melt away from the light, incapable of withstanding the sun’s full glare.
Meanwhile, design engineers have been wracking their brains for solutions to this solar weakness common among mobile phone displays. They have added reflective and transmissive technologies to mobile phone displays. They have enhanced the brightness of displays’ backlights, tinkered with materials used in manufacturing, borrowed some amulets from Nardong Putik, and put some holy water on them.
And after all that’s been done, the resulting display solutions worked at varying stages of success. Some barely made a dent on the sunlight-induced reduction in display quality, while others enhanced outdoor display visibility or readability, but required more energy, putting added strain on the mobile power supply.
By using high-reflectance silver instead of aluminum, and by developing a reflective lens that enhances the light’s concentrate rate into pixels, Samsung Electronics has developed a 1.72-inch super-reflective LCD screen, which the company claims comes with a reflectance rate three times that of existing conventional 128x160-pixel mobile display systems. This enables the user to have an unimpeded view of the LCD even in direct sunlight.
Samsung Electronics asserts that the enhanced transmittance features of the polarizer and color-filter enable the display to use more fully the light entering the LCD. This setup means that the LCD, which comes with a brightness of 100nit, a 220:1/30:1 contrast ratio (transmission/reflection) and 50 percent color saturation, does not consume more power compared with conventional display systems.
The company will install the new LCD technology on its lines of high-resolution transflective displays in stages. This means in the not quite so distant future, consumers will be seeing Samsung mobile phones equipped with displays that welcome direct sunlight as the most avid sun-worshippers do.
Meanwhile, I can hardly wait until I get to see for myself a handset equipped with Samsung’s latest LCD technology. Will its display be able to survive and thrive even under the sun’s most direct and strongest glare, or fade away faster than Superman with a kryptonite monkey on his back?
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