Samsung Develops World's First three-inch VGA LCD

Nomad05 writes "Samsung announced this week it has developed the world's first three-inch VGA LCD panel that "directly meets industry interface standards for digital still cameras." What this means is that future LCD screens on digital cameras will allow multimedia to be viewed at a resolution of 640x480. Presently, a majority of camera LCDs only display multimedia at a resolution of 320x240 — significantly lower in quality than Samsung's new LCD. In layman's terms, expect significantly brighter, more detailed LCD displays, which will enable you to review your photography more thoroughly after you take an exposure. This innovation will make it easier to spot blurry images and ensure your photo is framed properly. "

Shame displays are not like other tech products

[QuantumG]

If you go to Intel and ask for one unit of their latest embedded processor, they'll sell you a technology demonstrator kit. It's cost more per unit than if you were buying 200,000 units, but you can actually get one. The same pretty much goes for RAM chips or USB chips or whatever. Not for displays though. For some reason you can only buy displays by the thousands, unless you buy one from someone who has already bought them by the thousands. Most of the time it is cheaper to buy some consumer electronics device which has the component you're interested in it and pull it apart.

2.4 Inch VGA LCD Premiered Months Ago

[KingDork2K3]

3.2 Megapixel Phone Camera in Japan with VGA LCD

http://www.vodafone.jp/english/products/model_3G/v 904sh/index.html [vodafone.jp]

This is for VIDEO cameras

[aibrahim]

TFA says digital cameras, and then talks about 30Hz. Display syncing is not an issue for still applications- only for video.

What this really means is that you will be able to get crystal clear standard definition screens on your camcorder.

Of course its a bit late. A lot of the cameras now coming onto the market are shooting HDV and soon AVC HD- many in progressive formats and without the frame sync issues of SD video. So... they can include the older 60Hz LCD's and use frame doubling in the framebuffer. They can also use higher resolution small LCD's.

Still this is a great technology, and being able to do this should help Samsung's institutional knowledge about LCD's in general. I hope to see some of these devices used in LCD field production monitors of varying sizes.

SD ain't dead yet.

Re:Shame displays are not like other tech products

[mr_zorg]

The entire LCD display industry currently operates at a per unit loss, so they have to make it up in volume.

Your statement makes absolutely no sense. The only thing selling at a per unit loss in high volumes will get you is high losses. $0 x 1,000,000 units is still $0. Worse yet, -$10 x 1,000,000 units is -$10,000,000. You tend not to stay in business with that kind of model.

Actually, expect NOT brighter displays

[Anonymous Coward]

The 640x480 pixel is much smaller than the 320x240, by a factor of four. There is much more total empty area around the pixels of the higher density LCD than there is around the 320x240. It may seem counter-intuitive, but that's only because some bozo is saying more pixels (actually, there are more, smaller pixels) give you more brightness. It's exactly the opposite.

Re:Shame displays are not like other tech products

[kfg]

Your statement makes absolutely no sense. The only thing selling at a per unit loss in high volumes will get you is high losses.

Exactly. That's the point of the orginal joke; and what, I hope, made my joke on the joke funny. Because it's true.

Other poster has it pretty much right with his joke about the Xbox, we're talking pretty much the same sales model. The display makers are locked in a tech/market dominance war and have been bleeding cash for years, each hoping to make it up by being the last man standing. They can "afford" to do this because they have other, profitable, lines covering the losses. We're not talking garage businesses here. We're talking Samsung and the like.

This doesn't exactly suck for the consumer, but it does mean that the makers simply aren't in a position to deal with single unit sales of cutting edge stuff to experimenter/prototypers. They've got to move mass quantities for cash flow and to be the first to lock up corporate contracts, even though this means high losses. If they don't get whatever they're going to get in a hurry they're really fucked because of their high capital outlay.

So we've got to wait for it to hit Best Buy in some consumer gewgaw or other which we can gut for the bits, which costs us far less than the display maker could reasonably sell just the display for.

Are we having fun yet?

KFG

On the "layman's terms" thing...

[Nomad05]

I apologize for that -- I should have revised my submission and cut out all the fluff. The site it was written for is geared toward intermediate-advanced users of Digital SLR cameras and those with a general interest in photography. I certainly did not mean to discredit the intelligence of Sladhsot's tech-savvy audience.

I would have included more specs and details on the brightness of the LCD and pixel count had I been more considerate. Again, my bad.

Nomad05

Re:Batteries ?

[adrianmonk]

But now your batteries will last really long now!!

I'm sure it won't have a positive effect, but it may not have as much of a negative effect as you'd think. Back when I was doing Palm OS programming, I kept track of the trends in Palm hardware, and most of their machines are battery-powered devices using 320x480 displays (so half this resolution). Hardware review sites would do various battery life tests on new units, including various combinations of display off and on, CPU running and idle (and therefore halted and using very little power), backlight off and on, etc. And what I remember noticing is that the LCD really doesn't take up nearly as much power as you'd think. It's mostly the other parts of the device that use up the real power.

Also, I'm not really sure that a higher-res display will use much more power at all. Most of the power used is from the backlight, if I recall correctly, and that is going to be proportional mainly to the total area -- it shouldn't matter much how many pixels there are in that are. As for brightness increases, if this means a brighter backlight, then it might use more power (assuming all other things are equal), but with an LCD, there are two ways to increase brightness: one is to brighten up the backlight, and the other is to reduce the amount of light that the LCD blocks. The latter means you can get a brighter screen with the same backlight. If they do that, then it wouldn't necessarily increase power usage at all.

Re:Shame displays are not like other tech products

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Your statement makes absolutely no sense. The only thing selling at a per unit loss in high volumes will get you is high losses.

That would be false.

You make the false assumption that cost per unit is constant regardless of volume. That is rarely the case in real life, and especially not so in the case of high-tech manufacturing.

There are a bunch of very large fixed costs - the highlights include R&D and the construction of the manufacturing plant. If the marginal manufacturing cost is less than the selling price, then the higher your volumes, the more units there are to amortize those fixed costs. Thus larger volumes mean smaller losses.

Presuming your marginal cost is relatively constant, then at some point larger volumes will mean a cross from red to black, or in other words profitability. But even if that point is unattainable (say for instance it is larger than the total market) you still lose less money by selling higher volumes.

I realize this site is not MBAdot, but this stuff is basic econ101 and shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who went to college, or even the honors track in high school.

Re:This is Great

[Aphrika]

Even more stunning is the screen on the Sony UX180 [tomshardware.co.uk]. That's running a 4.5" diagonal display (about 4" x 2.25") at a resolution of 1024 x 600, which is absolutely phenomenal.

Add to that it's Xbrite and touchscreen capabilities and I reckon it's pretty much about as good as you can get at the moment - sort of coming in at around 260 dpi. When you run Cleartype on it in Windows, the anti-aliasing is virtually invisible, it just looks like paper.

Regarding the power consumption - AFAIK, the UX180 screen is LED backlight driven which saves a large amount of juice and gives a more even effect, hence the UX180's decent battery life when compared to the larger screen (and lower res) UMPCs - one of which is ironically made by Samsung.

Re:Shame displays are not like other tech products

[Anonymous Coward]

Presuming your marginal cost is relatively constant, then at some point larger volumes will mean a cross from red to black, or in other words profitability. But even if that point is unattainable (say for instance it is larger than the total market) you still lose less money by selling higher volumes.

(emphasis mine)

No. It requires that the marginal cost drops faster than sale price per unit drops as volume increases.