Detailed explanation of the advantages of PenTile OLED screen

Although Samsung Galaxy S III has shipped 10 million units in just two months, many users may not be satisfied with the PenTile arrangement of its 4.8-inch 1280*720 HD Super AMOLED screen. Samsung's answer to this question before was that the PenTile arrangement can extend the life of AMOLED, but many users are still not satisfied with this answer. Recently, OLED-Info interviewed the relevant person in charge, who brought us a more detailed answer.

In fact, the PenTile arrangement is not from Samsung, but developed by a California-based company Nouvoyance, which cooperated with Samsung to bring related products. The company's executive vice president Joel Pollack explained in detail why the PenTile arrangement is used in OLED panels and the various limitations encountered in actual production.

The following two pictures show the pixel arrangement of a standard RGB/PenTile AMOLED screen. Users who are familiar with the OLED light-emitting mechanism may have heard that the luminous efficiency of blue OLED is lower than that of red and green, and a higher current must be used to achieve the same luminous intensity - which means that the blue OLED decays faster.

In the PenTile arrangement, every two pixels share a green sub-pixel. This allows the blue OLED to have a larger area and a higher panel aperture ratio. This reduces the current required to achieve a certain luminous intensity, slowing down the decay rate and increasing the panel life.

Joel explained that under the current OLED display panel technology, unless the panel life is not taken into consideration, it is difficult for Samsung not to use PenTile arrangement on panels with a pixel density of 230ppi or above. When the panel pixel density is less than or equal to 230ppi, the manufacturer will not consider PenTile unless the user reminds it (after all, the arrangement can be directly observed by the naked eye and has a significant impact on the screen effect). At this time, the Super AMOLED Plus with native RGB arrangement will naturally appear.

Joel said that unless the luminous efficiency problem of blue OLED is solved, Nouvoyance expects Samsung to still use PenTile technology in high-resolution/pixel density panels. And the advantage of PenTile is that even if the life of blue OLED is not a problem, it also has an advantage in brightness, which has a positive impact on battery life.