The two huge benefits of Mirasol are battery life and the screen is visible outdoors.
Either of those is enough. A double whammy is great.
Many laptop and related advertisements show people sitting around swimming pools, on beaches, in parks, on farms and all sorts of outdoors places. Yes, it would be great to see cyberspace outdoors, but it doesn't work. Screens are not visible in bright light. I have to go and hide under a shady place and then the screen is hardly visible either.
Sunlight visibility and battery life are two important metrics for displays, but if you are talking about a screen that will display videos or pictures, quality is still paramount. FWIW, here is my take on the various numbers that Q has provided on display quality metrics (and there isnt much).
- Contrast Ratio. This measures the ratio of the luminance of the brightest white to the blackest black. The typical contrast ratio of a LCD in a handset is around 300....for OLED's, around 10,000. Qualcomm claims that iMoD displays have a contrast ratio equivalent of 10. Of course, the LCD and the OLED's contrast ratio will fall dramatically in sunlight (to less than 2) while the iMoD has a constant contrast ratio. From what I can tell, in almost any indoor situation, LCD's and OLED's are going to have an order of magnitude advantage in terms of contrast.
- Switching Times. This is the ability to smoothly reproduce a fast moving picture. The reaction times of LCD's are measured in milliseconds while the iMoD displays are in the microseconds. iMoD's should be an improvement over existing displays in reproducing sports and actions scenes.
- Color Gamut. This is the ability to reproduce the colors of the spectrum. The NTSC has a color gamut chart which LCD and OLED manufacturers are measured against. LCD's and OLED's are in the 70 to 100% range. I dont believe that Qualcomm has provided a number for this metric.
- Brightness. Qualcomm says that iMoD displays will be comparable to existing technologies. No numbers are provided.
As you can see, quite a bit of information is missing from any evaluation of iMoD display quality. I'm not sure if Q just doesnt have the numbers or that the numbers are a weakness so they have chosen to downplay display quality. None of the above will stop iMoD displays from find a number of niche applications, but if they are going to become the main displays on high-end cellphones or laptops, they are going to need to at least match the quality of existing displays.
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