Samsung is known for some of its crazy ideas, and it has come up with plenty of concepts for flexible displays in the past, even implementing one in the Edge series of smartphones. But now it wants to take things to the next level with a completely rollable display. It was shown off at SID Display Week 2016 in San Francisco, and basically makes Samsung‘s OLED technology ultra-portable.
Unrolled, the display is 5.7 inches and offers a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, so Samsung really isn’t messing around — this is the quality of display you would expect to find on any smartphone with decent specs. According to SlashGear, the display isn’t just great on paper, but it’s also just as bright and vivid as you would expect from any other Samsung display.
Of course, the best thing about this display isn’t how great the actual display is — it’s how small it can get. Because of the fact that the display is only 0.3mm thick, it can be rolled up onto a metal cylinder with a radius of 10mm.
The tech isn’t perfect yet — the display is 0.3mm thick, but only as a display. In other words, there’s no touch layer, and once implemented, the touch layer will affect both the thickness and the flexibility of the display, so don’t expect to have a rollable smartphone just yet. Samsung also has yet to figure out where to put a battery for the display to make it a commercially viable device, and the company hasn’t said how many times the display can be rolled and unrolled before it might crack or break.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a display that can be rolled up like a newspaper. LG shows off an equally impressive roll-up TV earlier this year. Between LG and Samsung, the future looks bright for flexible screens.
