At Display Week 2022 JDI and Innolux presented compact 3K LCD panels for VR headsets.
Japan Display Inc (JDI) is one of the world’s largest display providers, formed 10 years ago as a merger of the LCD manufacturing divisions of Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi. Innolux is Taiwan’s largest LCD producer.
Both new displays are roughly 2.27 inch diagonal, with a refresh rate of 90 Hz and resolution of 3240×3240 – equating to 2016 pixels per inch. The identical specs are likely due to a patent cross licensing agreement between JDI and Innolux.
This isn’t the first 3K LCD panel we’ve seen presented by display providers. At 2019’s Display Week AUO presented a 3456×3456 LCD panel with more than 2000 backlight elements to support HDR. However, that panel was larger (2.9 inch) and we haven’t heard anything about it since. In fact, AUO’s booth at this year’s Display Week didn’t feature any VR-sized panels at all.
JDI currently supplies the 2K (2160×2160) panel used in HP’s Reverb headsets. It’s 2.9 inches diagonal, so these new 3K panels are simultaneously smaller and much higher resolution.
The 2.27 inch size makes it suitable for use in compact headsets which use pancake lenses. At Display Week I tried Innolux’s panel paired with pancake lenses that appear to be identical to HTC’s Vive Flow. The clarity & sharpness was beyond anything I’ve tried before – even the Varjo Aero. While through-the-lens camera shots are far from representative of what’s seen by the human eye, here’s a short clip showing the demo imagery to give you a rough idea of the visual quality:
Neither JDI nor Innolux revealed if they have a customer yet, but if this does reach products we could be in store for a new generation of compact ultra high resolution VR headsets.
