Samsung hails single-chip 7in LCD panel

Samsung has created what it claims is the LCD industry's first single-chip, 800 x 480 colour panel made using amorphous silicon and measuring 7in in the diagonal. Interestingly, the company's Q1 UMPC, due any day now, sports a 7in, 800 x 480 display.

Standard panels of this size, Samsung said, typically use four to seven separate integrated circuits to drive them and key components need to be mounted on a separate circuit board. The new panel's chippery has been squeezed into a single package that's mounted on the device itself. The upshot should be cheaper panels and thus cheaper portable media players.

The panel is capable of displaying 16.7m colours at a contrast ratio of 400:1. It consumes 300mW but its backlight illuminates the screen to a brightness of 450 nits, Samsung said.

One nit, it turns out, is equal to 1cd/m², the usual measure of display luminance. When we read Samsung's announcement, we couldn't see why the manufacturer would prefer the less well-known unit of the nit rather than the official SI equivalent, and we're still scratching our heads over it.

Whatever, the LCD has a vertical viewing angle of 45-50° and a horizontal viewing angle of 60°, the company added.

The Q1 is due to ship early this month for around £800. The 22.8 x 14 x 2.7cm Q1 sports a 900MHz ultra-low voltage Celeron M processor, an Intel 915GMS chipset, 512MB of 400MHz DDR 2 SDRAM and a 40GB, 1.8in hard drive. The machine has integrated 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and 10/100Mbps Ethernet networking, plus Bluetooth 2.0 and two USB 2.0 ports. ®