Samsung Display said on Sunday it has become the first in the world to develop a 6.9-inch smartphone OLED that delivers both 2K resolution and a 165Hz high refresh rate, and will supply it for Vivo’s premium brand iQOO’s iQOO 16, to be launched in September.

The new product raises both resolution and refresh rate for gaming smartphone OLEDs. Existing 165Hz gaming OLEDs remained at about 1.5K resolution. The new panel increases resolution to 2K at the same refresh rate while cutting power consumption by about 30 percent. It also reaches up to 2,800 nits in high-brightness mode, the company explained, meeting the needs of users who play high-spec mobile games.

When both resolution and refresh rate rise, the number of pixels and driving circuitry that must be handled surges, making it difficult to secure both brightness and power efficiency. Delivering 165Hz at 2K requires refreshing the screen about every 6 milliseconds, requiring technology that charges and drives numerous pixels quickly and precisely.

To address this, Samsung Display refined its overall driving, emission and picture-quality technologies. It increased the thickness of pixel signal wiring by 10 percent from the previous level to reduce current resistance and raise charging speed, and applied a finer 22-nanometre process, compared with the previous 28-nanometre, to the display driver chip that controls each pixel, cutting computing power consumption by 30 percent. It boosted brightness with its polarisers-free OLED technology LEAD and the latest organic materials, and secured picture quality as well as luminance and colour uniformity with AI-based picture-quality optimisation technology accumulated over three years.

As a result, the OLED delivers the highest level of resolution among recently released 165Hz products while lowering screen power consumption to the lowest level in the industry. Maximum brightness reaches 10,000 nits at an OPR of 1 percent, referring to the share of operating pixels among all pixels that make up the screen, which the company said is the highest level in the industry.

Lee Ho-joong (이호중), head of product planning at Samsung Display and a vice president, said, "We integrated the world’s best OLED technology to simultaneously deliver high resolution and high refresh rate, high brightness and power efficiency." He added, "Based on Samsung OLED’s differentiated competitiveness optimised for high-spec games that require fast screen transitions and long play time, we will continue to strengthen technology leadership in the premium smartphone market."