LG's 2.4-inch VGA subpixel rendering LCD

Yeah, you read that right: LG's got a subpixel rendering 500:1 contrast ratio LCD with a VGA resolution packed into 2.4-inches of screen real estate (which is a pretty astounding 330 pixels-per-inch). Sure, the whole subpixel rendering bit leaves us a slight but uneasy about the legitimacy of this display being properly VGA resolution, but if you peep the pics a little closer up you'll see that subpixel rendering or not, you just can't really fake that much visual information on-screen. From what we can tell LG wants to get this thing in products within 5 months -- which means we've all got less than a half a year to either train our eyes to read really, really freaking small text, or come to terms with going blind.

[Via Akihabara News]

[Aigarius @ Jan 9th 2006 9:47AM]

Wasn't there a digital camera already on sale with 2" OLED display of 640x400? Nothing really nice here: come back when they have 2 megapixels in 1" screen - that would be the greatest for dSRL EVFs!

[Jon Acheson @ Jan 9th 2006 9:56AM]

Man, I would love to see LG put this into a Palm device (they're already a licencee).



Chances are, though, that if it happens it will be a smartphone, which is less useful to me.

[Ladderless @ Jan 9th 2006 9:59AM]

I could see this display used on phones and compact handhelds. A clip-on "magnifying glass" would make it more usable for small text.



So you'd end up with two devices -- A small one for simple, larger text, and one (with the clip-on) for reading documents or watching video.

[RockLobster @ Jan 9th 2006 10:29AM]

If the resolution is really good, I would love to see this mounted on a pair of eyeglasses and connected to a handheld PC.

[james @ Jan 9th 2006 10:34AM]

for under the Optimus keyboard keys?

[Nick @ Jan 9th 2006 10:39AM]

Jon Acheson: Palm make smartphones as well, last time I checked.

[PodMonkeys @ Jan 9th 2006 10:58AM]

That is pretty swanky. Its an even better picture because of the bare board components giving some size reference. Now Steve can get started on that iPod Pequeno!

[Za @ Jan 9th 2006 11:15AM]

Aigarius, if it has an EVF, it is considered an EVF camera and NOT a dSLR. In order to be a dSLR, it has to have an optical viewfinder.

[duh @ Jan 9th 2006 11:21AM]

high res doesn't equal small text. just increase the dpi of everything. prettier, smoother fonts, same size.

[Jason @ Jan 9th 2006 11:30AM]

instead of rendering ultra small text, the extra pixels can be used to smooth out larger fonts, so instead of relying on ClearType to remove pixelation, we have actual pixels to do that.

[Atanas Boev @ Jan 9th 2006 11:42AM]

Subpixel resolution is a trick that works when both pixel and background are shades of gray. Then, the HORISONTAL position of the "pixel" can be three times more precise, but the size of the "pixel" is the same as before. It produces best results with black text on white background (or the other way around). No wonder the test image is a webpage.

Maybe they also do tricks in temporal domain, otherwise I really don't see the big novelty. Hardware SR engine - who cares...

[kevin @ Jan 9th 2006 12:29PM]

perhaps a good for wearable displays?

[ax7 @ Jan 9th 2006 2:12PM]

This would be good for watching lesbian porn on my phone.

[Pablo @ Jan 9th 2006 2:34PM]

This will be used for LCD projectors, cameras, and some high rez camera phones.

[Doctor Three D @ Jan 9th 2006 3:45PM]

eMagin puts 800x600 on a .6in OLED display .. TWICE in the Z800 3dvisor

[Galley @ Jan 9th 2006 8:54PM]

Palm has been doing sub-pixel rendering for several years. Am I missing something?

[Tom @ Jan 10th 2006 2:40PM]

I suspect this is far more important for Asian markets than the US -- non-Roman text has a far harder time rendering on low-resolution displays than our fonts due to a greater number of elements per character. This would allow a much greater amount of Japanese or Chinese text to be displayed at a time.