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. "

Damn kids and their VGA's...

In my day, we had 320x200, and 16 colors. By God, we were thankful for it!

Re:Damn kids and their VGA's...

And 320x200? My teletype [columbia.edu] only had 132 columns.

Hold on, I gotta go chase some of those damn kids off my lawn...

20 bucks

Says that this ends up in a rock on someone's dashboard on that MTV show "pimp my ride".

Batteries ?

Don't get me wrong, this is a step in the right direction.

But now your batteries will last really long now!!

Re:Batteries ?

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.

Shame displays are not like other tech products

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.

Re:Shame displays are not like other tech products

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Re:Shame displays are not like other tech products

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.

Brighter screens, double both dimensions:

Enjoy the fun of 8 times your usual battery usage!

In Layman's Terms...

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.

So, when we are explaining new tech to people who do not know better, we can just make stuff up, right? Okay, maybe I could buy that you can verify framing easire in some circumstances, but how does resolution have anything to do with brightness?

2.4 Inch VGA LCD Premiered Months Ago

3.2 Megapixel Phone Camera in Japan with VGA LCD

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

hyperopia

This innovation will make it easier to spot blurry images

That's assuming you don't suffer from hyperopia.

What I'm looking forward to is a few years from now, when my 15.4" laptop screen will have the same DPI as this new panel. Of course it will take a couple gigs of dedicated VRAM, but the SVG based www of the future sure will look crisp on it!

Dan East

Stay close

VGA at 3" -> a pixel every .095mm, "a human can resolve distances of about 0.93 millimeters at a distance of one meter" wikipedia, 1000 / .93 * .095 = 102mm

So any farther than 10cm (3.9") from the display and you cant see the full detail of the image displayed. I guess it will work.

"In layman's terms"?

What do we need that for on Slashdot?

This is Great

Getting 640x480 on something that is only 2-3 inches wide is fantastic. If you think about it, that's about 200 dpi, which is pretty darned sharp. (Your average 17" screen is running 1024x768.)

I'd love to see PDAs/Cellphones take advantage of higher resolution displays, too. Though I don't know how that would affect power consumption or processing power.

Nearly an inch smaller VGA screen makes news?

Sharp and Toshiba both make PDA-sized VGA screens. Maybe NEC, too. I think the Toshiba is a 640x480 screen, while the Sharp is a 480x640 screen.

Look up the Toshiba e805 PDA. Or the Dell Axim x51v (which can be had cheaply). Both feature a 3.8" VGA screen.

So all that's been accomplished is the screen is an inch smaller.

I've had QVGA screens that were 1.6" in size, so they had the same DPI as this screen...

Re:Nearly an inch smaller VGA screen makes news?

I wondered what the big deal was at first,but then I realized that the big thing here would probably be the DPI. 640x480 on a 3" screen would require a higher DPI than a 4" screen. I haven't RTFA, but I'm assuming the deal is that they couldn't get that DPI before.

Resolution

Sounds like we are approaching 300 dpi resolution for LCDs. Can't wait to see this
in 10" laptop screens (something like 1800x2400 displays) and in projectors.

This is for VIDEO cameras

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.

Say what?

This innovation will make it easier to spot blurry images and ensure your photo is framed properly.

Say what? The images that are rendered onto the tiny screen of a camera are sized down with aliasing algorithms. Although the resizing will happen at 640x480 instead, this will have little impact since we do no longer take memorable pictures at this resolution. Memory is so cheap now and I'm sure we can get four gigs under a hundred bucks soon, too. So, either way, the picture is always going to be scaled down and viewed in proper resolution once you've zoomed in a few times.

Also, the higher resolution won't do anything at all for those of you who want to spot blurred pictures with more ease. Even if it's definitely a higher DPI, you end up watching at 3 inches which is very small, so blurred objects that appear not so sharp will appear sharp on this tiny display, simply because the blurred area will appear so small on a small screen, it won't even be noticable. Once again, zooming in is the only solution.

Either way, I'm sure someone will come up with an algorithm that detects blurred images automatically. It may not be 100 percent proof, but that's still a lot better.

I'm obviously trolling here, however. More DPI is always nice and I bet we can go to 1000 DPI before we stop bothering that much about it, but the arguments used in this article made no sense to me.

Gee...

Wow. Jeepers. Glad that stuff was explained in layman's terms. Otherwise I wouldn't have had a clue.

Is this slashdot or CNN?

Actually, expect NOT brighter displays

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.

Projector?

This would be great for one of those DIY projectors [lumenlab.com].

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

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

How times have changed

It was hard enough reading text on the 5" screen of the Osborne 1 [wikipedia.org], especially when run in 80 column mode back in the 80s. Heck, not too many years before, geeks were having fun getting the HP-41C goose [hpmuseum.org] to fly backwards.

Now these young whippersnappers at Samsung are rocking the boat! Get your microscopes out!

This is Slashdot..

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

Am I the only one feeling that those few sentences were unneeded and even inappropriate for Slashdot? I mean, come on, even if a few of us wouldn't have figured this out by themselves, this is Slashdot..

The world's first? Maybe because it's so big..

Sharp released the V-604SH phone in Japan earlier this year, which had a 640x480 screen in it. I don't know how Samsung qualifies their screen as a world first, but it would seem that their big claim is that it's 3-inches, where the Sharp screen is considerably smaller.

Sharp V-604SH [vodafone.jp]

Not to nitpick,

but "LCD displays"? Like "Liquid Crystal Display displays"?
I mean come on, this is supposed to be a site for techno nerds.

Pentax are going to love this.

They have a strategic agreement with Samsung, and at least one new semi-pro digital SLR camera due later this year (K10D ?). My only question would be: will there be enough space left on the back for the controls?

Why do desktop LCDs still suck?

So why are we still stuck with desktop LCDs with such crappy resolutions? Laptop LCD screens have been kicking ass for years.

Three-inch CRT

_That_ would be something!

GaS Would Use This...

How long before you see it on Pimp My Ride? Every car on that show has AT LEAST three LCD screens

To all submitters and editors:

In layman's terms, expect significantly brighter, more detailed LCD displays,

Can we just fuck right off with the phrase "in layman's terms" and the accompanying explanation? This is slashdot, news for nerds. We are nerds. We are NOT laymen. Yes, we know what VGA is. Yes, we know what it means when you double the resolution of an LCD. To suggest we don't demonstrates the editor's complete ignorance of the readership.

In other news...

Samsung's marketing department was severely reprimanded Friday after convincing R&D there was a market among squirrels for VGA monitors.

Samsung... knows Apple, right?

Am I the only one wondering if the next iPod will have a VGA display?

Squinting

That is some small pixels! Now I can really squint my eyes at the display! Honestly, I just hope the design engineeers would design and use some noice and readable icon and fonts when using this type of small but higher resolution display!

How many DPI can I get on a desktop monitor?

So I make that 267 DPI. Is it possible yet to get a 200 DPI monitor for a desktop computer? Say, 17 inch?

Re:Homos. Explain me this, you idiot

See, when you're trying to angle your camera under the bathroom stall, it helps if the display is... er wait. Never mind.

Re:battery life

True some cameras let you zoom in on the image on the LCD screen but having used 2 similar cameras with different LCD resolutions I can say it does make a difference. The cameras in question are the Canon Powershot A540 and A700 models. The physical screen size is the same (2.5") but the resolution is different on each. The A540's screen has 85,000 pixels whereas the A700 has 115000 pixels. Those 30000 extra pixels make a world of difference.

Now if they were to go to a 3" screen at 640x480 that'd be fine, as long as the battery life isn't too badly affected, but IMO that's as far as they should go with regards to screen resolution.

Now if only this tech were applied on a larger scale and they made 19" monitors with it!

Re:battery life

To be honest, I don't see the point. I have a Canon Rebel XT. I shoot in RAW mode (8.9MB/pic). I have a 4GB card, which results in 420 or so pics. I have yet to take 420 pictures in a single shooting before accessing my PC to offload pictures, but, just in case I do - I have a 1GB backup card (at a whole $29 these days, who can't afford one if they can afford the camera in the first place?)

Using the LCD for any purpose other than a quick look-see to show someone else is pointless IMHO. The Canon doesn't even allow you to frame with the LCD, you have to look through the finder just like with the old film cameras. Battery life would go to hell if the LCD were used for this. Without the LCD turned on at all, you get about 1100 pictures out of a single charge. With each shot (or series of shots in rapid fire mode) showing for a mere 2s, you get about 550 pictures. That's a serious drain.

As I also have a point and shoot that does have the LCD shooting paradigm, I have to say that when it comes to the types of pictures I take with the Canon, the LCD is virtually useless. With the point and shoot, it's handy. However, I don't think I'd trade battery life for higher resolution on the screen, since the previous argument applies about memory cards being plenty big - just buy an extra one and do your processing on a computer (much much faster and easier).

So what's that leave for the LCD point and shoot paradigm? Framing, really. You have very little real control with those cameras for any other purpose that higher resolution would be handy for. I personally haven't found the LCD resolution to be limiting my framing abilities.