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Comment by Tagbert

10 hours ago

Bezels are useful for devices that you can’t just hold in the flat of your hand. Provides a place to hold on to.

Also, this is an LCD screen. The substrate is rigid. An OLED, like on the iPhone is on a flexible substrate and can be bent at the edges to connect to the circuit board. That lets you put the screen closer to the edge.

5 comments

Tagbert

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maven29  2 hours ago

The technique you mention is very outdated and not used anymore. Current thin-bezel OLED panels (even on flexible substrate OLED) use a packaging technique which can be used in the exactly same way on rigid LCD panels. Folding the substrate with driver bonded is expensive, affects yields, and doesn't even get you the thinnest bezels

There are no LCD panels in recent phones that use COG packaging (chip-on-glass) for the display driver and run into the limitation you mentioned. Almost all current LCD phones will utitlize COF (chip-on-film) where the TFT array is attached to a flex-pcb which also contains the display driver.

You can achieve bezels just as thin or thinner using this technique, and Apple has used the technique you mention only once, COF is used even on flexible OLED panels.

FirmwareBurner  4 hours ago

I have had phones and tablets with IPS displays with way thinner bezels so that argument is void.

  • nsonha  33 minutes ago

    Which argument? Pretty obvious the bezel is that way for usability (so you can hold the device). That other devices exist with thin bezel does not prove anything.