Samsung is no stranger to strange display technology. As a pioneer of many different kinds of displays and proponent of its own rather popular and incredible looking AMOLED and OLED displays, Samsung likes to put out new and interesting technology to see what sticks. We’ve seen this from them in the smartphone market where they tend to flood shelves with phones of all different types, sizes and prices, and now they’re working on a few new types of displays that may make themselves into future smart devices. Samsung unveiled the industry’s first mirror and transparent OLED display panels at the Retail Asia Expo 2015 in Hong Kong, marking yet another new type of display for the company.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen transparent displays, but it is the first time that display has been OLED and also doubles as a mirror display, upping the number of possible products it can be placed in. This new technology isn’t just a display in front of a mirror though, it’s using Intel’s RealSense Technology to make the display more interactive than just any old display would be. Functionality for a mirror using this new tech could cover something like allowing users to virtually try on new clothes and colors instead of having to go through the whole rigmarole of actually trying the clothes on. This could paint some seriously big news for online clothing shopping which typically is difficult since different manufacturers always have different sizes of clothing, and Intel’s RealSense Technology accurately measures objects and can recreate them in an augmented reality space.
Samsung is touting the reflectivity of their mirror OLEDs over similar LCD types made by company’s like LG, saying that theirs is 50% more reflective and has significantly improved color gamut and contrast ratio. These last two characteristics are common in OLED panels when comparing them to LCD panels and should come as no surprise for anyone who’s familiar with display tech in general. Samsung’s new mirror displays also don’t require an ambient backlight to display images on the screen, giving them deeper black levels and likely less power consumption as a whole. Samsung didn’t debut this tech in any particular product so there’s no telling when it’ll hit the market in any real form, but there are plenty of useful applications here which means it’ll be sooner rather than later without a doubt.