Samsung Shows 240 Hz ‘Blue Phase’ Display

Samsung has developed an LCD panel with a 240 Hz display rate capable of handling high-speed video...but doesn't expect to bring it to market until 2011.

South Korean electronics giant Samsung has announced that is has developed the world’s first LCD panel with a 240 Hertz refresh rate, potentially removing the blocks from high-speed video on flat panel screens. Dubbed "Blue Phase" because of blue tones the engineers saw when developing the technology, Samsung says the display uses an extremely cost-efficient design that’s less susceptible to "bruising" (where pressure on a panel impairs brightness) than normal LCD displays.

"Our blue phase mode is a major evolutionary development beyond conventional liquid crystal modes" said the executive VP of Samsung’s LCD R&D Center Souk Jun-hyung, in a statement. "Samsung’s development of this technology provides a tremendous opportunity to move image quality of LCD screens much closer to that of a real moving image."

The Blue Phase LCD panels can run at 240 Hz without using an overdrive circuit, and don’t use traditional alignment layers like the In-Plane Switching, Twisted Nematic, or Vertical Alignment technologies commonly used in LCD panels today. Instead, the display creates its own alignment layers so it doesn’t require cumbersome rubbing and alignment processes during production.

Samsung plans to demonstrate a 15-inch model of its Blue Phase display at the Society for Information Display symposium in Los Angeles next week; the company expects mass production of Blue Phase panels for high-speed televisions and video production gear to get started in 2011.