Samsung Omnia 2’s AMOLED screen demoed outdoors
Brandon from Pocketnow has finally answered a question that has been raging on forums for a while now – how does the Samsung Omnia 2’s OLED screen manage bright sunlight.
Based on its amazing indoor performance many expected the same outdoors, but as the video will demonstrate below, unfortunately this is far from the case.
The question therefore becomes how likely are you to use the device outdoors. Given just regular usage the answer is probably only a small proportion of the time, but that time is likely to be filled with a lot of frustration.
Read more at Pocketnow here.
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As bad as LG Arena I had the misfortune to review two months ago. iPhone and iPod are way better in sunlight than this waste of parts.
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wow…ok..so its official, samsung is not good with there screens.
i have heard that alot but i thought they were changing the page with the amoled…apparently not.
well…another reason to wait for july 2010 for my newest phone.
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Well, this was to be expected based on the panel’s technologies– resistive touch membranes significantly reduce sunlight visibility, and OLEDs are not particularly known for sunlight readability as it is. Apparently Samsung’s backlight behind the OLED couldn’t compensate for that.
The only mobile screens I’ve come across that are usable in the sunlight are glass capacitive panels like the iPhone’s.
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admin Reply:
August 3rd, 2009 at 8:16 pm
OLED’s have no backlights.
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amb9800 Reply:
August 3rd, 2009 at 8:20 pm
The Omnia II does have a traditional backlight behind its AMOLED screen, and it’s turned on by default — see the PocketNow review, which mentions this: http://pocketnow.com/review/samsung-omnia-ii-i8000?p=1
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admin Reply:
August 3rd, 2009 at 8:24 pm
I see the words, but it does not make sense. LCD’s push light from the backlight through gated colour filters. OLED’s generate light directly – the backlight would only reduce contrast, and there would be no channel for the light to pass through.
I suspect the “backlight” on the Omnia 2 is actually a brightness setting.
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Carl Reply:
August 3rd, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Indeed. There’s a lot of misconceptions about how OLEDs work even amoungst professionals, but they are actually quite straightforward. They work fairly similarly to plasma displays, except replace the small flourescent bulbs with LEDs. What confuses people, I think, is that their manufacturing process is quite similar to LCDs with their TFT backplane, but backplane ? backlight.
Would like to have seen another non-AMOLED screen beside it for comparison.
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Physboy Reply:
August 4th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
I’ll second that. Along with a live demo of how the screen is affected by the brightness settings in the sunlight.
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