LTPO display is the hot topic right now. Apple has decided to integrate LTPO displays into their upcoming iPhone 13 Lineups. Let’s have a look at why Apple chose LTPO displays over OLED displays-
What’s LTPO Display?
LTPO basically stands for Low-temperature polycrystalline oxide. This is actually a backplane technology for the OLED displays that are used on gadgets mostly. OLED is the organic light-emitting diode, which is a very popular display these days due to its lower battery consumption. LTPO display is much more efficient than OLED displays.
Smartphone displays take maximum power than other components. In this case, OLED screens are efficient but do not solve the issue completely. OLED screen consumes more power than WiFI and Bluetooth adapters do on a smartphone. When there is full-screen content on white background, OLED displays do not do much good. LTPO display plays better here. LTPO displays can control the refresh rate. While the refresh rate controls the battery usage significantly.
Intro to Refresh Rate
To say more about refresh rate, this is actually how many times the entire display updates to show contents in a second. To be more precise, a 60 Hz display means that in a single second the display will turn on and off all its pixels 60 times.
LCD Display
For LCD displays, all the small LCDs are connected in series. When the display is turned on all the LCDs need to power up. Even if you look carefully, the black portion of the LCD screen emits some light because all the pixels are turned on but dimmed on there. That is why LCD display will not save battery even if you use dark mode. Suppose, A wallpaper has a black background and a white circle in the middle. To show this wallpaper, the LCD screen will turn on every single LCD of the display. To show the white circle, all corresponding LCDs will be turned on with their full intensity. To portrait the black background, the LCDs will be dimmed as much as possible.
LED and OLED Display
LED and OLED displays, on the other hand, uses special arrangements for the LEDs where they are powered individually. So when the screen wakes up, only those LEDs are powered which will show the content. Let’s see how the above-mentioned wallpaper will be shown using a LED display. Here, only the white circle needs to be displayed. As when LEDs are turned off the screen is black. Therefore, only LEDs required to portrait the white circle will be turned on in this case. All other LEDs will be turned off. Thus LED display saves battery more than LCD displays utilizing necessary LEDs only. So having dark mode turned on or a dark wallpaper can save battery on all the LED type displays.
LTPO Display
Coming to LTPO displays, things are a little bit more interesting. Well, Let’s consider the same wallpaper again. LTPO display will turn on the pixels which are only required to portrait the white circle and all other pixels will be turned off like OLED displays but it does something more. As mentioned about the refresh rate above, LTPO display controls that. For static content like that wallpaper, the LTPO display can reduce the refresh rate to 1 Hz. That means in a single second all the required pixels will turn on and off once to display the white circle, where the OLED display did it a minimum of 60 times. In this way, LTPO displays can save more battery than LED displays.
As LTPO display can control the refresh rate, therefore, when a user will select higher refresh rates like 120 Hz or 144 Hz, this display will not show contents at that higher refresh rate always rather the display will use variable refresh rates. As mentioned before, For static contents the refresh rate can be lowered down to 1 Hz. At the same time when needed, for dynamic contents, the display can opt for higher refreshing. Thus unlike other displays, LTPO display is much more efficient and a better pick.
Wrapping Up
These are some brief information about the LTPO display. Apple iPhone 13 will be using the same technology to integrate higher refresh rates on their upcoming iPhone 13 models which they are calling ProMotion Displays. This technology will help them to increase the “Screen On” time on their newer devices as well.
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