Liquid crystal display and organic light-emitting diode display: present status and future perspectives

Recently, ‘Liquid crystal display (LCD) vs. organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display: who wins?’ has become a topic of heated debate. In this review, we perform a systematic and comparative study of these two flat panel display technologies. First, we review recent advances in LCDs and OLEDs, including material development, device configuration and system integration. Next we analyze and compare their performances by six key display metrics: response time, contrast ratio, color gamut, lifetime, power efficiency, and panel flexibility. In this section, we focus on two key parameters: motion picture response time (MPRT) and ambient contrast ratio (ACR), which dramatically affect image quality in practical application scenarios. MPRT determines the image blur of a moving picture, and ACR governs the perceived image contrast under ambient lighting conditions. It is intriguing that LCD can achieve comparable or even slightly better MPRT and ACR than OLED, although its response time and contrast ratio are generally perceived to be much inferior to those of OLED. Finally, three future trends are highlighted, including high dynamic range, virtual reality/augmented reality and smart displays with versatile functions. The two leading flat-panel display technologies—liquid crystal displays and organic light-emitting diode displays—have been compared. Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) currently have the upper hand, but organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology is rapidly catching up. Shin-Tson Wu of the University of Central Florida and colleagues have documented recent material and design advances in these two technologies and analyzed display performance with respect to six key metrics: response time, contrast ratio, color gamut, lifetime, power efficiency, and panel flexibility. They concluded that LCDs are superior in terms of cost, lifetime and brightness, whereas OLED displays offer better black states, flexibility, and faster response times. The technologies have similar ambient contrast ratio, image motion blur, color gamut, viewing angle and power consumption. Emerging applications include virtual and augmented reality wearable displays as well as displays with high dynamic ranges.