TCL flaunts large tri-fold portable OLED monitor built with inkjet printing
IFATCL brought its tri-folding portable OLED monitor that goes from a 16-incher to a huge 28-inch diagonal, and it might hint at where laptop and monitor screens are headed next. The panel is made by CSOT, the company's display arm. As expected, the monitor has two fold lines instead of the single crease found on most foldables today.
CSOT says the panel folds to a bend radius of just 1.8 mm, and the whole thing measures 4.48 mm thick when fully unfolded. That's thin enough to blur the line between a laptop screen and a rollable tablet, and TCL is pitching it as a way to combine the portability of a normal laptop display with the immersive width of an ultrawide monitor, all inside something one could still slide into a bag.
What makes this panel different from other foldables isn't just the tri-fold hinge design, though, as these are becoming a dime a dozen. It is built using inkjet printing, or IJP OLED, a manufacturing method that TCL and others have been developing for several years now. Instead of using a fine metal mask and vacuum evaporation to deposit the red, green, and blue subpixels, as is standard for most OLED panels today, IJP essentially prints the organic material directly onto the substrate, similar to how an inkjet printer lays down ink on paper.
Manufacturers like Samsung have reported that IJP can use OLED materials more efficiently, since less is wasted compared to evaporation through a mask, and industry analysts have pointed to potential production cost savings of up to 35% over conventional methods. It also removes the need for a fine metal mask entirely, which simplifies the process for large or unusually shaped panels, folding displays being a good example.
Just as it did at the MWC and SID expos, TCL also showed its 14-inch 2K IJP OLED laptop panel with 99% DCI-P3 coverage and an anti-glare coating, as well as a refresh of the 27-inch 4K 120Hz IJP OLED monitor panel that reaches 500 nits full screen brightness.
None of this means a tri-fold IJP OLED monitor is landing on shelves any time soon, and TCL has been lugging these around expos for six months now. This is very much still proof of concept gear, but when TCL brings the cost benefits of inkjet printing to something this ambitious, tri-fold portable displays might become an actual space- and cost-saving product for digital road warriors.
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