This Samsung Display 15.6" UHD OLED is headed to premium laptops

If you've been holding off on a laptop upgrade until the next big thing in screen tech arrives, Samsung Display has some excellent news for you. The company has shown off its latest OLED panel, a 15.6-inch Ultra HD screen that it says is the first such UHD display for the notebook market.

As we've seen in smartphones and tablets, OLED has no shortage of advantages for mobile devices. In the case of this particular 15.6-inch screen, Samsung Display is particularly excited about how it meets the DisplayHDR True Black specification, developed by VESA. That includes black colors that are a hundred times richer than previous HDR standards, and high-contrast almost up to the level of the human eye.

Compared to LCD panels, meanwhile, the new Samsung Display screen offers a 1.7x higher color volume. That should mean better clarity for outside viewing, along with less image degradation from bright sunlight.

As with all OLED screens, the illumination is built into the pixels themselves. Samsung Display says the panel can get as dim as 0.0005 nits, or as bright as 600 nits, while its dynamic contrast ratio is a whopping 120,000:1. Black colors are 200x darker than an LCD panel could manage, while whites are twice as bright.

For colors, meanwhile, 3.4 million are supported – that, Samsung Display boasts, makes for roughly twice the count of a similarly-sized LCD panel. It meets the DCI-P3 color standard, too, and even manages to do so while pumping out what the company says are "significantly less blue wavelengths" that could have a positive impact on eye-strain after prolonged use.

Unsurprisingly, this is all being targeted at premium notebooks first. Apple's MacBook Pro, Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon, Dell's XPS 13, and the Surface Book 2 have all counted image quality as being among their primary benefits, targeting photo and video content creators as well as digital artists. There, features like accurate colors, a broad contrast span, and slender bezels all count for maximum appeal.

Samsung Display isn't saying who it might be working with to put this new 15.6-inch OLED screen into actual notebooks. However it does say that it has agreements with a number of OEMs, and that mass production of the panel is expected to kick off in mid-February. Gaming, graphic design, and video streaming will be among its key focuses.