nateight wrote:I can understand Samsung keeping a tight leash on panels designed for a proprietary phone - they wouldn't want to sell a bunch to some Chinese grey marketeer who might turn around and produce a cheaper competitor - but will such restrictions hold for devices that Samsung isn't even in the business of manufacturing?
As someone else said in a thread on the Oculus forums : "A new product is always a competitor for your own market.". If you had spare money to shell out next year, would you buy the Oculus Rift or the Galaxy S5 ? To me that answers the question as to why Samsung would have no interest in selling OLED panels to Oculus VR.
nateight wrote:The benefits of an OLED panel seem so significant in an HMD context that Oculus will surely stop at nothing to source one.
I don't see the benefits to be that much significant. To me there should be at least 4 advantages for OLED over LCD : resolution, black level, motion blur and latency.
1) Resolution
Someone did a
side-by-side comparison of the 1280x800 devkit and the 1920x1080 Samsung Galaxy S4 with the A-cup lens and honestly I've not been impressed by the difference. It's arguably better (although still debatable, the grid is also still clearly visible and the colors are less natural), but I thought the jump in resolution would be much more impressive considering the doubling in pixels. I think it may be related to the PenTile layout on the S4 display though, but it's not inherent to OLED technology and could be different in new panels. I'd really like to see the same picture taken on the HD prototype to compare.
2) Black level
Although black level in OLED panels should be really great, there have been concerns with the Galaxy S4. Apparently there is a problem causing smearing when all pixels are black, and the only way to correct this is to disable pure black. See :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNwCuufJuLM . I don't know if this can be corrected in new panels or how the black level in this panel does compare to LCD though.
3) Motion blur
I'm not sure this panel or the one in the Galaxy S5 will be exempt from motion blur, at least it was not the case in the Galaxy S3 :
http://www.blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/ . And motion blur can still be eliminated in LCD with strobed backlighting like in the LightBoost monitors.
4) Latency
From what I've read LightBoost adds ~4ms latency with 120Hz LCD (see :
http://www.blurbusters.com/benq-xl2420z ... z-monitor/). No idea for OLED though, maybe around 1ms if Oculus VR were talking about OLED for the pixel switching time in their "Virtual Reality - A new frontier in computing" slides.