Samsung Display to Begin Mass Production of Rollable OLED for Laptops | Hacker News Reader

Samsung Display to Begin Mass Production of Rollable OLED for Laptops

global.samsungdisplay.com

49 pointsgnabgib52 comments

Rollable makes you think like toilet roll or something. It's looking more like "slid under battery and keyboard, bit of a shallow bend" to me.

Maybe somebody can do teardown and show us what it looks like packed away, and how the mechanism works?

It's a bit more "slightly bendy sliding door" to me at least.

Wouldn't it be quite an extreme bend once the screen is stowed and the laptop is closed? 180degrees at like a 1-2mm radius curve I would expect. That could actually roll up given a 1-2mm centre to roll onto.

It there's a rod under the hinge structure it could be bending through the radius of a pencil at worst.

Well Lenovo just demonstrated one at CES: https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/electronics/lenovo-think...

LG has one (but they make their own screens): https://www.lg.com/us/lg-signature/rollable-oled-tv-r

The lenovo video shows you everything except how it works. It's the one I watched to come up with "isn't this just sliding doors without Gwyneth Paltrow?"

The LG one has a plausibly large box. I can believe this is rolling up like a scroll. Or a toilet roll.

The Lenovo video literally shows you a working device from the floor of CES. By how it works do you mean instead... (a) where the excess is stored, (b) how it's rolled, (c) what the (surely quite valuable) IP is?

Yes. How is exactly what I meant, not "does it work" but "how does it work" which is why the word "how" was in there.

That IP will be protected by patents, it won't survive by secrecy the first ifixit teardown or one of the bill of materials calculation sites will remove that veil.

No need to be snarky, googling "samsung rollable display patent" isn't so hard:

https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=US43...

Thank you for that. It's almost exactly what I expected with a twist. It's not a roll up. It's a roll around. I apologise for the snark.

That patent shows the kind of screen they use in those phones that you fold in and out.

Like for example the Samsung Galaxy Fold Z phones.

https://www.samsung.com/en/smartphones/galaxy-z-fold6/

I wonder if they use the same kind of folding/rolling screen or not in that laptop they show in the OP article.

When I last looked at these kinds of phones in the store I found the screens super underwhelming. Maybe it has improved since.

That's probably not what most people here understood with "rollable". It doesn't form a a roll like a roll of paper.

I thought the meta or prevailing wisdom was software developers / programmers should NEVER™ read patent documents?

And the whole LG site about it shows... a box and a "add to cart" button (which doesn't work). Do they really expect us to buy the cat in the bag sorry in the box?

Well, it would be less useful in a roll. This way you keep the laptop form factor. It's probably the best approach.

Older thinkpads had ugly bulges for extra life batteries which doubled as "it's better for your typing at this angle" lift. You could (for instance) get quite a lot of less dramatically tight rolling in that. Or concertina it. Sinclair's "tape drive expansion" in the z80 days was reel-less free tape inside the insanely tiny cartridge. It just smooged the tape up in a giant concertina inside.

https://hackaday.com/2020/09/18/the-zx-microdrive-budget-dat... - on a single spool ackshully.

There you go. I wuz wrong and you iz right.

Scrollable

I wonder if replacing laptops with smartphones based computers has a potential to ever become mainstream. Instead of carrying a laptop, use your phone + foldable display + keyboard and mouse. This could be more ergonomic than laptops, you could have larger display, placed higher and further away, and use a more comfortable keyboard. It could also be smaller and lighter in total than carrying the laptop.

This has been tried several times (most notably Samsung Dex; but long, long back by Motorola in Atrix circa 2011) - nobody wanted it because the display plus the keyboard and a mouse is as heavy as a laptop.

You don't carry around the screen/peripherals. You arrive at a workstation and just plug in your phone. The monitor/mouse/keyboard are already there. You can work while on the go or out/about and then setup at a workstation instantly.

Dex is actually useful and I see people using it in business settings somewhat often. Basically anywhere a chromebook is useful Dex also fills that niche surprisingly well.

on android there's also windows connect or whatever it's called so you can pretty seamlessly use your windows laptop and samsung phone side by side. Everything syncs nearly instantly, including texts/phone calls. It's pretty rad when it works properly.

>You don't carry around the screen/peripherals. You arrive at a workstation and just plug in your phone. The monitor/mouse/keyboard are already there. You can work while on the go or out/about and then setup at a workstation instantly.

At that point, why are the peripherals not just accompanied by device with a CPU & internet connection?

This is where Citrix / thin clients come in too, compact enough to be mounted on a screen, cheap, and mobile/flexible.

Which gets you a high quality mouse, an ergonomic split mechanical keyboard, and larger screen in the same "mass budget"? Sign me up!

As an ergo nerd who has played around with a ton of different form factors, including exactly the one you describe, I'm genuinely starting to believe that wearable tech, i.e. 'XR' glasses, is the most promising in this space. Something like this[0] but with a phone instead of the computer.

I plug the Viture XR pros into my Samsung phone and put them on, I get a beautiful 1080p screen projected 3m in front of me, the phone becomes a touchpad, and I have a low profile bluetooth split I type on. Very comfortable, very usable everywhere, including while you're walking around (not that I do this very often). It looks a little dorky but less with every iteration, and way less so than having an Oculus on your head. Not to mention that the quality of the displays is incredible.

[0]: https://x.com/boomskats/status/1860300923773296693

Do you think the keyboard can be replaced by a virtual one (existing in the VR world only)? Or do you think the tactile feedback is necessary?

One of the main issues with the infamous butterfly keyboard Apple put on MacBooks a few years ago was the near lack of tactile feedback. It had feedback, but not nearly enough for a half-decent typing experience. Zero tactical feedback is probably 100x worse than that.

There’s a crazy guy who’s the author of my favorite neovim plugin called markview that has 2k+ stars on github, he does everything from his phone, but I have no idea how lol

He was doing everything from his phone. But the community got together and donated enough money for him to buy a laptop.

I think he posted an appreciation post on reddit about it.

Neither the less, it's quite an achievement. Especially when it was a well received plugins

This just seems like the completely wrong form factor for this technology, Like they were just given these screens at a discount and told make it work.

Seems fine. People want portability, but modern laptop screens also are not designed with bloated word processors and their unnecessarily large toolbars in mind. Browsers are also often best viewed vertically.

Hard disagree, from at least an ergonomics perspective. Just because we're not accustomed to seeing it as consumers doesn't make it 'wrong'.

For context: I've been carrying a separate keyboard/mouse around alongside my laptop for quite a long time - not because I don't like my thinkpad keyboards, but because it lets me flatten the laptop hinge to 180 degrees and stand the laptop upright, bringing its screen to eye level (something like this pic[0]). It is incredibly comfortable, and for me it's worth the inconvenience. But having a display that would let me bring my primary content up to eye level, without all that faff, and with some gratis screen real-estate for secondary content I can just glance down at, is something I would definitely spend my money on.

I'm obviously in the minority here, but the ergonomic implications are universal. Nobody likes that crappy pain you get between your shoulderblades from hunching over your laptop in a cafe for 4 hours. They just put up with it because the _current_ alternatives are too impractical for most.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/4khwpt/hotdesking...

Some R & D Titanics become unthinkable to give up, the ship of the damned carrier must arrive at port and fail at sale. "I guess the people were just not ready for it"

I think a laptop is a good form factor for this. I just with the screen would stretch horisontal instead of vertical.

We’re deep into a cycle in technology where customer/consumer/user/worker preference aren’t even paid lip service anymore: Samsung is so powerful in Korea that demand is what they say it is. Meta is so ubiquitous that icky LLM slop participants will get booked as fractional users via cooked engagement metrics and earnings reports will reflect “growth”.

These guys are cosplaying: it’s not commerce when it happening by default is priced in by everyone!

A million dollar cover charge to an inauguration? Give me a fucking break.

We’ve managed to combine the dynamism of a lethargic central planning committee with the social welfare of a rapacious frontier anarchy with the costumes and titles of a failed state.

I thought it seemed pretty cool.

What is the right one?

Left and right vs. bottom / top?

I was wondering why were they beta testing folding screens on their users for so many years now. Personally I wouldn't mind more screen real estate, particularly if it reaches eye level.

I expect it to cost as much as a laptop + screen though, so unless the user insists on portability, it won't be cost effective.

The fact that it's motorized hints that users could not be trusted to unroll it manually, meaning it has to be fairly fragile.

I really would have preferred this rnd went to cheap high dpi HDR laptop screens instead...

I'll wait for a crystal ball display. Now that would be cool.

in case anyone needed the TikTok form factor on a laptop

Samsung seems to equate a larger display area on a laptop with increased worker efficiency/productivity - disregarding ergonomics or durability of their products.

Since laptop displays with a few exceptions have the bottom of the screen on the desk, bigger ismore ergonomic as it raises the center up, at least up until the point the center becomes too high, which is pretty huge.

I use my laptop with the external display on top of it, so this setup matches my way of working fwiw. True, I hoped it somehow unrolling like the elder scrolls, but alas we're obviously not there yet (and I don't think I would be able to do Python on a scroll).

Yeah that's going to end up warped and break 10x easier than anything else.

Concept is cool but simple, robust, reliable is needed for portable devices.

I refer to my colleague with the foldable that got broken no less than 3 times before he went purple with anger and bought an iPhone. Also the surface was horribly warped and suffered from really bad wear. Why iPhone? Because Samsung service and support here is absolutely dire.

Interestingly Apple used foldable screens as far back as iPhone X, to reduce the bezel part. But in their case the fold is safe as it never moves.

Yep. As far as I understand, all OLED screens are on a flexible substrate (polyamide) but it's bonded to the glass because it wears out.

based on our foldable mass-production experience, we have designed to ensure durability in our rollable products

...i.e. "it'll last until the warranty expires, provided you take extreme care with it".

They have several years of "foldable mass-production experience" in smartphones where the bend radius is much smaller than it needs to be in any laptop.

A warranty protects against manufacturing mistakes - it could be (very reasonably) argued that a warranty is a promise for how long something is expected to last.

OLED screens as a whole are disposable products with lifetimes often around 5 years nowadays, I believe.

Of course its life beyond normal, projected, warrantied full-time use is questionable, that's why it's out of warranty.

Addendum: to compare, it's a lot like a car part warrantied for X number of years.

Apple will probably copy this in a few years, add some minor UX improvements, then claim they invented it.

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