The 3 Most Common Smartphone Display Technology Type, TFT, AMOLED And IPS Explained

The Display (Screen) is one of the major components of your smartphones and in this era of modern mobile technology, there have been major shift from keypad type phones to now mostly wider touchscreens.

These screens (displays) now have wider applications and appear to be the largest component in surface area of touchscreen smartphones.

We are quite certain that while going through the specs of your smartphones, on the display part, you must have noticed that your device has one of these display types; IPS, AMOLED or IPS, but not all of you pay attention to that or really know what they represent.

TFT, AMOLED and/or IPS are the 3 most widely used display technology on modern smartphones and we want to use this avenue to explain them in simplest way so as to give you understand of what these display types are.

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It is important to note here that these 3 display types in use today are all based on the Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) technology.

Starting with TFT;

TFT stands for Thin-film-transistor and this type of LCD technology uses a thin film transistor to improve the qualities of images that are produced on your smartphone screen, mainly it improves on contrast.

TFT is more like old fashioned and has lesser applications presently than the other two types of display technology that we will be discussing thereafter.

Therefore, it is mostly used on low-end devices like your Nokia 230, Nokia 222, and the most recent application of plane TFT display can be seen in the latest Gionee M3 Mini smartphone.

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AMOLED

AMOLED stands for Active-Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode and this type of display technology is not totally different from the TFT described above, but it is more advanced and improves on the limitations associated with the ordinary TFT.

Unlike TFT, AMOLED display technology makes use of organic compound to produce light when electric charge passes through it.

Now, like TFT, AMOLED display arranges the display pixel on LCD screens in special pattern known as Active-Matrix.

AMOLED display addresses the issue of high cost and high power consumptions in display technology, meaning that is cheaper to produce and consumes lesser power.

It currently has wider applications on smartphones than the former.

Most Samsung smartphones screens are based on AMOLED display technology, and some HTC devices are known to come with AMOLED display, some few Gionee devices are also based on AMOLED display.

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IPS

IPS stands for In-plane Switching and appears currently to be the most common and most widely use display technology on most smartphones among TFT and AMOLED.

It is based on parallel arrangement and switching of the molecules of the liquid crystal on LCD.

IPS was designed mainly to address the issue of poor colour quality and to lower the dependence on strong viewing angles.

Most Apple, Sony, LG, Xiaomi uses IPS display technology for their mobile devices and also most MTK devices are also based on IPS display.

Finally, it is important to understand here that those 3 display technology explained above are not the only screen technologies but currently stands as the most widely used; we have others like the old plain LCD display used on your monochrome phones, there is also OLED display technology that does not involve Active-Matrix arrangement etc.