Samsung had showed off its flexible displays at CES 2011, but now, Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) has revealed something better – flexible, foldable screens that will never show a visible crease along the fold line. To prove this, researchers performed a test that folded/unfolded the display 100,000 times, with no apparent effect observable to the human eye, apart from a negligible 6% decrease in brightness along the junction.
Using nothing fancier than regular and readily-available hyper-elastic silicone rubber, Samsung’s prototype foldable display also had a glass cover along with it, which would act like the touchscreen, and a protective layer. If you were wondering just how much the display could be folded, the official closing radius is just a millimetre – with the two ends almost touching.
[RELATED_ARTICLE]Many companies, big and small, have shown off their flexible displays, most of which can bend, extend, or be rolled. However, foldable screens were usually avoided because of the inherent creasing problem, one that now appears to have had a very simple solution.
Speaking about how the whole set up works, HongShik Shim, one of the lead researchers from the team at SAIT, said: “All the materials in a foldable window unit (glasses and silicone rubber) must have almost the same optical properties and attach to each other strongly without any optical property change.”
