Why do the colours on a phone screen look the same from all directions but a laptop’s gets distorted when you look at it from a different angle?
In: Technology
It all comes down to the technology that’s used. There’s numerous different ways you can design a monitor. Three of the most common standard technologies are TN, VA and IPS. TN and VA both get distorted when you look at them on an angle *but* they’re cheaper than IPS and it’s easier to get them to run at higher refresh rates. OLED is another emerging technology that also doesn’t have this viewing angle issue, but is even more expensive too.
It comes down to a decision on product design. You *can* get monitors that don’t do this – in a phone size, in a laptop size, both work. I have a 27 inch IPS monitor, it runs at 144 hz, wasn’t that expensive and doesn’t distort when you look at it in a different way – we can make it work in larger than laptop sizes. It was *more important* for phones to have more angles so they got IPS screens earlier.
A good laptop screen is not very dependent on the viewing direction. It’s mostly the cheap TN screens which are really bad at this. Smartphone screens are mostly IPS and OLED, both of which are much less dependant on the viewing angle. And in addition they mostly just dim at extreme angles instead of distorting the colors.
All the above are various technologies, with TN and ISP being LCD-based. If you want to know more about any of those, you can ask here (or search the internet if you want).
Most phones these days are using OLED screens. Each pixel’s red, green and blue dots glow on their own.
As opposed to most (but not all) computer screens which operate on a backlight which is white, and then colour filters in order to produce the red, green, and blue as well as control the brightness of each.
These filtering layers do have an impact on the viewing angle. Not being straight on means the filtering mechanisms start becoming more of what you see… Like, on a house a window has a frame that goes on both the inside and outside of the home. Viewed straight on, you don’t really notice the frame and can see in/out of the house fairly well. But at an angle, you see more of the frame itself and its thickness through the walls meaning less space is available to see into the house…
Whereas an OLED doesn’t have a window with a frame, and instead just attaches a lamp to the outside wall of the house.
OLED has a life span and will die out over time, so for screens that are not powered up as much, they make more sense.
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