JDI announces new low-power display for smartwatches

Japan Display, one of the world’s largest manufacturer of displays, has announced a new low-power display technology for smartwatches. The company won’t be compromising by using a black and white colour scheme like a couple of smartwatch makers. Instead, the company says it will consume about 200 times less power than a conventional LCD display.

Displays are the one of the biggest consumers of power in modern gadgets. In smartwatches, since the usable space is quite small, there’s little scope to have a bigger battery to make sure the watch lasts long enough. Some companies use their own tech to overcome this limitation.

JDI’s new display tech doesn’t compromise on colour and sunlight visibility to work around the battery capacity limitation. The screen doesn’t use a backlight, meaning the display will consume around 0.5% of the power of a similar size and resolution LCD display.

JDI announced the new 1.3 inch display at a resolution of 320×300 pixels. It’s quite okay for a v1 product. The company will be sending out samples in March, with mass production planned to begin in July.

There’s no word yet on which companies will be using JDI’s new displays, but it won’t be far-fetched to imagine a lot of Chinese companies lap this up. Currently, Samsung and to some extent LG have a hold on the smartwatch market as far as Android OEMs are concerned.

Source (in Japanese)