Samsung Teases Its Stretchable OLED Display

Is Samsung over its foldable display obsession? Well, yes and no. It has more or less mastered that, pending coming out with an actual device that takes advantage of that. In the meantime, however, it has turned its attention to another kind of deformable display. At the Display Week in Los Angeles, it showed off to a limited audience a 9.1-inch "stretchable" OLED display. And now it is sharing a video for the rest of us to gawk at the screen's elastic properties.

There are benefits to a stretchable display over a foldable one. A foldable screen, which has been Samsung's, and LG's, focus for the past few years, can fold and deform in only one direction. A stretchable display, however, can be deformed in more ways than one.

The video below demonstrates that in action. The screen, when pressed from above, deforms and depresses like a rubber balloon. Also like a rubber balloon, it goes back to its original flat shape. But more than just the stretchy property, Samsung also emphasizes on how there's little to no loss of display resolution in the process.

You can probably imagine all the potential uses for this kind of screen, but Samsung Display seems to already have a few in mind. Those include automotive and the Internet of Things as well as wearables. The latter is potentially more interesting to consumers, especially in light of developments in the area of "smart" textile.

Of course, a deformable display is just one, though critical, piece of the puzzle. As evidenced by the still non-existent foldable tablet/smartphone. But if Samsung is already moving on to a new type of screen, there could be a chance we might indeed see one such foldable device before the year is over.