On February 28, IHS Markit TMT published an article stating that high frame rate (HFR) can only improve the display effect of smartphone screens to a limited extent.
IHS Markit TMT said that there are several problems with HFR technology. Higher pixels per inch (PPI) will result in narrower circuit line width and greater resistance. AMOLED displays using HFR will result in greater power consumption and pressure drop.
In addition, the right and left border designs may be widened due to the need to include more lines to achieve interlaced scanning.
The human brain feels stuttered when recognizing motion composed of a series of still pictures with clear boundaries. HFR cannot solve all problems for improving the smoothness of the picture.
Take the picture below as an example, such as a sliding page in a game or Weibo. According to the dynamic content generated in the application, each frame of the image is clear during the movement of the white block. Therefore, HFR can help improve the fluency of the dynamic content on the demo application.
But for the video picture, if it is playing a video source, each frame of the image is blurred during the movement of the white block, and the effect of improving the video playback is small.
IHS Markit TMT said that because brand manufacturers need to balance performance, battery life and cost, while many flagship smartphone models adopt HFR, the increase in refresh frequency specifications will remain stable at a certain level, rather than a substantial increase.
Smartphone screens with 90Hz refresh rate, higher than the typical 60Hz, attracted plenty of attention from last year.
With this feature being available only to a few devices, phone makers including OnePlus and Xiaomi are equiping their devices with even higher 120Hz displays.