14 DAY TRIAL // Whenever a company gets to boast about being the first to accomplish something at least mildly significant, one can be sure that a whole press release will be dedicated to it, and it seems that Samsung is the latest to announce something of this sort.
The current IT market is packed with many sorts of displays, all of them trying to stand apart somehow, whether through size, image quality, energy efficiency, price or all of them at once.
Samsung decided it was high time something truly unusual began to spread around the world, so it pushed itself to become the first mass producer of transparent liquid crystal display panels.
No doubt many people saw the concept of transparent displays in Sci Fi movies at least once, and it looks like the era envisioned therein moved one step closer to reality.
What the outfit has on hand is a 22-inch panel with a resolution of 1680 x 1050 pixels (WSXGA) and which boasts a transparency rate of over 20% and more than 15% for the black-and-white and color types.
For the sake of comparison, conventional LCDs that use Back light unit (BLU) are limited to a 5% transparency.
They should serve well in advertising, schools, corporations and various interactive communication devices.
What's more, Samsung actually went as far as making the 22-inch display 90% more energy efficient that regular screens.
This is all because, due to its nature, it has no need for backlights, relying, instead of the ambient light, even sun light which is known to be the bane of many a backlit screen.
“Transparent displays will have a wide range of use in all industry areas as an efficient tool for delivering information and communication,” Younghwan Park, a senior vice president of Samsung Electronics LCD Business, said.
“With the world’s first mass production of the transparent LCD panel, Samsung Electronics plans to lead the global transparent LCD market by developing various applications.”