Samsung Display has developed the world's first 15.6-inch OLED panel for the notebook market, the company announced Wednesday.
You can already find laptops with 4K screens, which feature a 3,840-by-2,160-pixel resolution. However, the OLED technology from Samsung Display promises to offer brighter colors and deeper blacks over competing 4K LCD-based screens.
"The new display provides a spectrum of 3.4 million colors (double that of similarly sized LCD panels), which allows for truly life-like images," the company said in its announcement.
Black colors on the OLED panel will appear about 200 times darker over LCD screens, whereas white colors will appear about twice as bright, Samsung added. Images on the OLED panel should also look fairly clear when viewed outside in the sunlight.
Another benefit of the OLED panel is how it comes in a thin package. This can help PC vendors create slimmer designs with their new laptop models.
Samsung Display will start mass-producing the panels for hardware vendors in mid-February, with the first screens slated to arrive in higher-end laptops. The company didn't name through which vendors. But the technology was likely previewed in a few notebook models shown at CES this year. For instance, HP's upcoming Spectre x360 is a 15-inch laptop convertible that'll go on sale in March with the option of featuring an OLED display.
There's no word yet on when the technology will arrive for smaller notebook sizes. But you probably won't find it on cheaper laptops. One big drawback with OLED technology is how the screens are expensive to make and supplies can be limited.