Samsung beats up Retina displays

Samsung Display has a few new goodies to show off at Display Week, including three displays that make Apple’s Retina panels look rather outdated. 

The company has developed a new 4.99-inch AMOLED 1080p panel for smartphones. The resolution is not spectacular, but since going for higher resolutions on such small panels is pointless, Samsung focused its efforts on display quality. It claims the new screen has the world’s broadest colour gamut. Coupled with AMOLED’s exceptional contrast and proper blacks, it sounds promising. 

Next in line is a 10.1-inch 2560×1600 panel for tablets. It’s not a show stopper, as Samsung already uses the same resolution screen in the Nexus 10, which leads us to believe that this is merely an incremental upgrade. 

However, Samsung notebooks might get some very sharp panels indeed. The company has developed a 13.3-inch 3200×1800 panel, which tops Apple’s Retina screens used on 13-inch MacBooks, which top out at 2560×1600. In fact, it trumps even the 2880×1800 display on the 15-inch MacBook Pro.

In addition, Samsung did not simply squeeze more pixels using off-the-shelf technology. The new displays feature fewer driver circuits and improved LED backlighting efficiency, which means they need 30 percent less power than current generation displays. However, GPUs rendering a couple of million more pixels will probably need a lot more juice, offsetting the savings.