alt Hacker NewsLG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life
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Haven't phones, watches and tablets been using low refresh rates to enable battery improvements for a while?
The Apple Watch Series 5 (2019) has a refresh rate down to 1Hz.
M4 iPad Pro lacks always-on display despite OLED panel with variable refresh rate (2024):
https://9to5mac.com/2024/05/09/m4-ipad-pro-always-on-display...
> LG’s press release leaves several questions unanswered, including the source of the “Oxide” name...
> Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3096432 [2026-03-23]
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> HKC has announced a new laptop display panel that supports adaptive refresh across a 1 to 60Hz range, including a 1Hz mode for static content. HKC says the panel uses an Oxide (metal-oxide TFT) backplane and its low leakage characteristics to keep the image stable even at 1Hz.
> Source: https://videocardz.com/newz/hkc-reveals-1hz-to-60hz-adaptive... [2025-12-29]
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> History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. ~ Hilary Mantel
Sorry, might be obvious to some, but is that rate applied to the whole screen or can certain parts be limited to 1Hz whilst others are at a higher rate?
The ability to vary it seems like it would be valuable as there are significant portions of a screen that remain fairly static for longer periods but equally there are sections that would need to change more often and would thus mess with the ability to stick to a low rate if it's a whole screen all-or-nothing scenario.
Anyone who has accidentally snapped the controller off a working LCD can tell you that the pixel capacitance keeps the colours approximately correct for about 10 seconds before it all becomes a murky shadowy mess...
So it makes sense you could cut the refresh time down to a second to save power...
Although one wonders if it's worth it when the backlight uses far more power than the control electronics...
> A 1Hz panel is almost, but not quite, on the level of an e-ink panel, which isn’t the prettiest to look at.
level of what? Power consumption? dude e-ink takes 0 power between refreshs.
And e-ink is pretty?
I'm guessing that for this to work you need to be able to selectively refresh parts of the screen at different rates? a 1Hz refresh rate would be rubbish just to follow the mouse cursor, so at least that part of the screen needs to refresh faster. However, it does make sense for the parts of the screen that are mostly static. Looking at my screen as I type this, the only part that needs a high-refresh rate is the text-box where I'm typing (I can type several keys per second so I wouldn't want a refresh rate of 1 Hz). However, the rest of the screen is not changing at all so a slow refresh is perfectly fine.
Horrid website: forced cookies, invisible adverts (Mamma Mia, anyone?), and that thing where it’s a page of garbage links when you go back. I will never click a PC World URL again.
The real unanswered question is how much of this is the panel itself and how much is baked into Windows.
Saving battery is nice, but I'm not leaving Linux for that misery any time soon
As soon as I saw this announced, I wondered if this is why we haven’t seen OLED MacBook Pro yet.
Apple already uses similar tech on the phones and watches.
Still waiting on e-ink laptops. This just seems like a no-brainer.
Sure dropping toward 1Hz could be huge. But the moment you scroll, watch video, or even have subtle UI animations, you're back in higher refresh territory
Is this materially different from panel self refresh?
Today I learned, laptop comes with backlit vs edgelit panel. And, they have different energy consumption.
There are also mini LED laptop for creative work. Few more things to check before buying new laptop.
Tried to open this page on my mobile, good grief the changing advert spam overload kills the reading experience.
Apple introduced variable refresh rate back in 2015. That’s over a decade ago, I’m sure there’s some new tech involved here, but quite the omission.
Modern software regularly takes like 1 second to load anyways. 200ms is the minimum human reaction time, so adding 100ms would only add like 50% to the REPL user interaction. Something like 10Hz might be quite usable while minimally contributing to lag.
The idea of having a 60Hz screen is nice, but in practice it turns out that display refresh rate is not the bottleneck for most software.
What's the chance this will even work on Linux with GNOME?
Perhaps it can do 50Hz, which may be beneficial for emulating PAL systems.
So if a pixel is not refreshed, it doesn't use any power?
this is just regurgitating the manufacturer's claim. I believe it when I see it. Most of display energy use is to turn on the OLED/backlight. They're claiming, because our display flickers less, it's 48% more efficient now.
Make a new phone with this please.
imagine what it will do to neo !
I once had an external monitor with a maximum refresh rate of 30 Hz, and mouse movements were noticeably sluggish. It was part of a multi-monitor setup, so it was very obvious as I moved the mouse between monitors.
I'm not sure if this LG display will have the same issue, but I won't be an early adopter.
> That will help save enormous amounts of power: up to 48 percent on a single charge,
Why does refresh rate have such a large impact on power consumption? I understand that the control electronics are 60x more active at 60 Hz than 1 Hz, but shouldn't the light emission itself be the dominant source of power consumption by far?