Cellular Phone Displays Go Hi-Res

Mobile screens are important components of mobile phones because, as the author of this article notes, “the quality of the image plays a role in determining the perceived quality of the overall device”. The sale of displays for mobile phones nearly tripled between 2001 and 2005, from 366 million to 975 million, according to DisplaySearch, and its expected to increase to 1.4 billion displays by 2009.
One interesting point the article made is about the resolution of the screens. “It is also unlikely that resolutions higher than VGA will be required; a 2.4-inch VGA screen has 333pixels per inch, which is more than three times as many as a typical SXGA desktop PC monitor. Even when you consider that users tend to view a phone display at about half the distance used to view a computer monitor (50cm or 19.6 inches, compared with 30cm or 11.8 inches), the phone display’s apparent pixel density is still about twice that of the PC monitor…One problem with the increased resolution, however, is that the LCD cell aperture ratio is decreased, so a brighter backlight is required to achieve the same image brightness as with a lower-resolution panel. For example, a 2.2-inch QCIF+ panel has a 60 percent aperture ratio compared with only 10 percent for a 2.4-inch VGA panel. Today’s more efficient LED backlights may ease that problem.”
And of course, the brighter, higher-resolution screens must also be thin and light to please the consumer…

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