2013 Smartphones With 5-Inch 443 PPI Full HD 1,080p Displays Will Kick Glass

By Paul B. Wordman on October 10, 2012 · 3:43 pm

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2013 smartphones will apparently include a bevy of products good enough to eye for.

Let the Display Screen Games Begin

In the first week of June this journalist reported that Japan Display Inc. (JDI) had announced a 651 PPI, 2.3-inch LCD display, with almost exactly twice the pixels per inch of Apple Inc.'s iPhone 5 which offers 326 PPI. That's certainly a huge advance in display technology, but apparently was more of a technology demonstrator, a progenitor of good things to come.

It's fairly obvious that 2.3-inch displays have limited real-world applications, and it's doubtful that operating system software, or the graphics hardware could currently handle the huge total pixel count that 651 PPI would generate on a five-inch or larger phablet screen.

Send in the Real-World Contenders

JDI (Japan Display Inc.) is going beyond tech demonstrators with its announcement of impending mass production of a 5-inch full-HD, 1,080 x 1,920 display with 443 PPI. In a joint venture with Hitachi, Sony, and Toshiba, JDI will produce TFT-LCD modules utilizing LTPS (Low-Temperature Poly-Silicon) and IPS (In-Plane Switching) technology to manufacture screens displaying approximately 2.3 times more information than currently possible on 720 HD (720 x 1,280) display screens. The results will include very high contrast, wide viewing angles, and high luminance with minimal color-shift.

Sharp Corporation has begun production of its own 5-inch full-HD (1,080 x 1,920 pixels) LCD displays for smartphones employing CG-Silicon (Continuous-Grain Silicon) technology along with a new pixel design. CG-Silicon allows for fewer layers, and increases manufacturing yield. Another Sharp advantage is their 5-inch screens can operate at lower power consumption levels as compared to other 5-inch displays. At 443 PPI the Sharp panels provide as many pixels on a 5-inch screen as found on full-HD TV displays, as also does the JDI panel. Manufacturing has already started in Japan, and Sharp will ramp up volume in October 2012. It should be noted that Sharp makes the 5-inch screen for Apple's most recent iPhone 5, with only 326 PPI.

LG will provide display screens for the Chinese company Oppo, which announced the Oppo Find 5 smartphone. The announcement indicated 440 PPI, but that is easily accounted for as a rounding error in PPI calculators, and should be equivalent to the Sharp and JDI displays; all three of which offer a PPI count that provides a 35% pixel density improvement over Apple’s so-called “retina display”. The new LG display screens will include AH-IPS(Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching) to provide wide viewing angles, excellent accuracy in expression of color palettes, and rapid response to touch inputs.

A Transparent Gorilla & a Schott in the Light

Corning Gorilla Glass 2 or Schott Glass Xensation will probably top-off many of those display screens. Both Corning and Schott have released new technologies in products that are highly flexible, and very resistant to scratching and breakage. Schott for example has formed an alliance with Berliner Glas, a specialist in glass processing, in order to make an anti-glare product called Schott Xensation™ Cover AG. First shipments of touchscreen devices using Xensation glass are scheduled before the end of 2012.