In an era where almost everything can be "rolled," even screens have joined the trend—but this "rolling" is not about industry internal competition; it refers to a physical property. Known as "flexible displays," these screens break free from the conventional flat shape and become flexible enough to curl, bringing screens into public view in a softer form.
As the name suggests, the core feature of flexible displays lies in their "flexibility." They can bend, fold, or even curl like paper or fabric while maintaining full display functionality—completely different from the rigid screens we are accustomed to.
Traditional rigid screens are mostly solid flat panels with almost no plasticity; even slight deformation can easily cause the panel to crack. By contrast, flexible displays, with their inherent flexibility, break this physical constraint. While presenting vivid images, they can bend or deform both vertically and horizontally.
This fundamental change in physical properties endows screens with unprecedented freedom in form. They can adhere to irregular surfaces or fit seamlessly onto curved structures like cylinders and domes, turning surfaces that were once inaccessible to traditional screens into potential display media.
In a broad sense, the much-talked-about foldable displays and rollable displays in recent years are two key branches of flexible displays.
Foldable displays (widely used in smartphones and laptops): They can open and close repeatedly like a book. In the folded state, the device has a compact size; when unfolded, it offers a much larger display area—twice the size of the folded form.
Rollable displays: More similar to the scrolls of ancient China, they use a mechanical structure to store the screen inside the device and stretch it out horizontally or vertically when needed. This design avoids the crease issue of foldable displays and enables stepless adjustment of screen size.
Flexible displays are never a single type of product; instead, they represent a new form of screens. When screens break free from the "rigid" physical constraint, they can integrate digital media into real life in more flexible ways.
Traditional screens are strictly confined by rigid frames. So, how do we make hard screens become so "flexible"? The answer lies in their materials and structure.
Traditional LED displays use rigid materials for their substrates, with circuits and light-emitting units built on hard bases—any bending will cause breakage. The key to flexible displays is replacing all these rigid components with flexible alternatives.
Most flexible displays use ultra-thin polymer materials (such as polyimide, PI). This material itself is like a flexible plastic film, boasting high flexibility that allows it to maintain structure and functionality even after repeated bending or curling—laying the physical foundation for the screen’s flexibility.
In terms of circuit design, flexible displays adopt special flexible printed circuit boards (FPCBs) or metal mesh technology. This allows the circuits to deform flexibly as the screen bends, ensuring stable electrical connectivity even after repeated folding.
Most flexible displays use OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) technology. Each pixel acts like a tiny firefly, capable of self-illumination without relying on a backlight layer.
This self-illuminating feature greatly simplifies the screen structure: it only requires two electrode layers sandwiching a layer of organic light-emitting material, all attached to a substrate. This ultra-thin structure eliminates the need for rigid frames to house complex components, making the screen’s flexibility possible.
From flexible materials to simplified structures, these innovations allow screens to bend, fold, or curl while maintaining stable circuit connectivity and structural integrity—just like unfolding a scroll.
From the evolution of screen forms, the emergence of flexible displays is not just a showcase of technical prowess; it is a technology evolution precisely driven by commercial needs.
The bendable nature of flexible displays frees content from flat surfaces, creating more innovative visual expressions:
In automotive showrooms, flexible displays can be made into curved walls to build immersive brand experience spaces, enhancing visual impact and immersion.
In art installations of retail stores, they can take creative forms like cylinders or curved surfaces, serving as eye-catching dynamic art carriers.
In daily life, flexible displays can be crafted into various shapes: from curved car dashboards that fit seamlessly into interiors to e-readers that can be rolled up like paper—spawning device forms unimaginable with traditional technology.
For display devices, there has long been a contradiction in user experience: people want display devices to be portable, yet they also crave the immersive experience of large screens. This contradiction is almost unsolvable with traditional rigid screens.
Flexible displays—especially foldable ones—skillfully resolve this conflict. Through physical shape transformation, they enable a single device to switch freely between a compact size and a large screen, truly achieving the "best of both worlds" and meeting users’ core needs for screen usage.
Although the current high cost of flexible displays limits them mainly to the high-end market, they are like a key full of possibilities, opening up abundant room for imagination for the next stage of evolution in display devices.
The profound significance of flexible displays lies in breaking the mindset that "screens must be flat." They allow screen forms to proactively adapt to product functions and usage scenarios, rather than forcing scenarios to accommodate the rigidity of traditional screens.
