DisplayMate analyst Ray Soneira’s just posted an in-depth review of the latest crop of 7″ tablets. He found that Amazon’s new Kindle Fire HDX 7″ uses an innovative new display technology called quantum dots to achieve great color and brightness:
While IGZO has been getting most of the attention, a dark horse called quantum dots has emerged as a new and truly revolutionary super high-tech advancement for LCD displays – and it is showing up for the first time in the Kindle Fire HDX 7, which we test here.
Quantum dots are almost magical because they use quantum physics to produce highly saturated primary colors for LCDs that are similar to those produced by OLED displays. They not only significantly increase the size of the color gamut by 40-50 percent but also improve the power efficiency by an additional 15-20 percent. Instead of using White LEDs (which have yellow phosphors) that produce a broad light spectrum that makes it hard to efficiently produce saturated colors, Quantum dots directly convert the light from blue LEDs into highly saturated primary colors for LCDs. You can see the remarkable difference in their light spectra in Figure 4. Quantum dots are going to revolutionize LCDs for the next 5+ years. To learn more about quantum dots read this from Nanosys. Congratulations to Amazon for leading the way and being the first to incorporate this revolutionary new display technology in Tablets! It will be interesting to see how rapidly other manufacturers adopt quantum dots. See Figure 1 and Figure 2 and the Colors and Intensities section for details.
The Kindle Fire HDX 7 is Amazon’s third-generation LCD tablet, and their displays have been improving by leaps and bounds since we first tested them back in 2011. Their full-size flagship Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 is the best performing tablet display that we have ever tested, due in part to using the highest performance LCDs with low temperature poly silicon LTPS. But the mini Kindle Fire HDX 7 that we test here is also incredibly innovative because it is the first tablet display to use super high technology quantum dots, which produce highly saturated primary colors for LCDs that are similar to those produced by OLED displays. They not only significantly increase the color gamut to 100 percent but also improve the power efficiency at the same time. It’s a very impressive display with very impressive technology. More on these issues below.
