'klikklak' said:
As I don't frequent this forum all that much this might be a duplicate:
How much would a OLED version of pandora cost extra? .. OLED is my main reason to be interested in the Wiz (it's always good to invest in new screen technology), and I'd really like to see it on the pandora. Have the devs considered doing a version like this in the future?
OLEDs of the size we're talking about aren't cheap at this time. They're nice and they blow the doors off of an LCD display, yes, but the pricepoint would have been even more painful for everyone had they chose to use one on the current Pandora. As for a conversion, you'd need to know how to interface to the LCD LVDS drive lines and translate them to the OLED equivalents. Not for the faint of heart to say the least. Couple that with needing to get an identical touch screen module to the one integrated with the LCD or getting an OLED panel with a similar setup and then passing those signals to that edge...
I'm not going to say "no" but anyone wanting to attempt it has their work cut out for them. It's, in theory, doable, but it's not even remotely cost effective- it'd have to be a "because I can" type thing.
The OLED screens I have seen have all been on mobile phones (i.e. small and low res) and they all have integrated controllers, which is totally different to how most LCDs are interfaced.
Incidentally, LCD panels rarely use LVDS signalling natively, and it would seem unlikely for the pandora to use it, as it would need a chip on the pandoras motherboard to convert to LVDS, and then another chip inside the screens part of the case to convert back to the parallel digital interface used by the LCD and output by the OMAP, and if they did do that they might as well have a chip on the motherboard that also spits out HDMI or DVI too. LVDS is normally used in newer laptops to reduce the pin count of the LCD cable so it won't struggle through the hinge, and also in DVI and HDMI for the same reason but also to increase the possible transmission distance and decrease noise susceptibility. I could be wrong about the pandoras signalling, but this would appear to me as being unnecessarily complex.
Ahem, anyway, screens with a controller built in (like most OLED screens) are tricky beasts, and are often very expensive (except for small ones) because as well as the integrated processor they also tend to have framebuffer ram in the LCD electronics, and that's before you think about the cost of the screen technology itself. The whole thing can make it difficult to, for example, use the 3D hardware of the OMAP, since to interface directly to the OMAP you would not use the standard LCD output (instead you'd use some other bus), and you'd need to write extra drivers to talk to the controller (which uses processor time when it's running - which is always). You could use a fast microprocessor to convert the LCD output of the OMAP into graphics controller commands, but that would be quite arduous. It would also use extra battery power (not to mention that the LCD has an integrated controller and RAM so it's already using extra power - though maybe this is offset by it being OLED). LCDs with their own controllers are normally useful when you have a low performance main CPU/micro that isn't capable of doing it's own graphics (not fast enough, doesn't have fast enough IO).
However, having never seen datasheets for large OLED screens I cannot really say for sure whether or not they use a standard interface or a built in controller. I see no reason why they shouldn't use a standard interface, I've just never seen an OLED screen that doesn't have a built in controller.
So in essence I'm saying more-or-less as Svartalf said, they simply aren't in wide enough use or cheap enough yet. But I can't see why it wouldn't be possible in the future. A drop in replacement for the existing LCD I would expect to be highly unlikely though, unless OP had it manufactured specifically for them (which is VERY expensive).