Super AMOLED Display

Super AMOLED Display.

To understand Super AMOLED you first need to understand its origins. It started with OLED, which stands for 'organic light-emitting diode' and consists of a thin organic film with electrodes at either side. As soon as an electric current is applied to the film it emits light.


AMOLED is an 'active-matrix organic light-emitting diode'. It adds a layer of semiconducting film behind the OLED panel which allows it to more quickly activate each pixel. That increased speed makes it ideal for larger, higher definition displays with a lot of pixels. In fact it's as much as 1000 times faster than LCD.

AMOLED screens also tend to have great contrast, as the light on the screen comes from each individual pixel rather than a backlight; when it needs to create a black colour it simply dims or turns off the relevant pixels, for a true, deep black.

AMOLED screens also use a large colour gamut, so they can display a wide range of colours, but that can also cause images to look very vibrant or over-saturated.

Other advantages of AMOLED screens are that they have wide viewing angles and can even be made transparent or flexible, which makes them ideal for the curved handsets which are starting to hit the market, such as the Samsung Galaxy Round.

An AMOLED touchscreen usually has an extra, touch sensitive layer on top of the screen, but with Super AMOLED Samsung has been able to integrate touch sensitivity into the screen itself.

The result of this is that not only is the screen thinner, lighter, more touch sensitive and less power-hungry, but without that extra layer it's also far less reflective than a typical AMOLED screen, making it easier to view in bright sunlight.

On the other hand Super AMOLED screens are quite susceptible to image burn in and sometimes use a PenTile matrix with fewer subpixels than their LCD companions, which can potentially lead to less sharp images or give the screen an unnatural colour tint.

Samsung obviously has a lot of faith in Super AMOLED, as the company uses it in its latest flagship (the Samsung Galaxy S5) as well as most other phones in the Galaxy S range, but it's also developed variations on the technology.

For example there's Super AMOLED Plus, which was used in the Samsung Galaxy S2 and has a standard RGB matrix rather than a PenTile matrix, meaning it has 50% more subpixels and therefore delivers clearer images, but it also degrades faster than a Super AMOLED display, which is why Samsung stopped using it in its flagships.

Then there's HD Super AMOLED, which is just a 720 x 1280 Super AMOLED display and Full HD Super AMOLED, which, you guessed it, is Full HD 1080 x 1920.