MicroLEDs are hard to make but offer several advantages. They feature wide viewing angles, high dynamic range, wide color gamut, fast refresh rates, high brightness, and low power consumption. The technology promises a total brightness that's up to 30x higher than OLED, while offering higher lux per Watt efficiency. With microLED, devices can offer excellent readability in any angle, even in direct bright sunlight.
At the moment, the technology isn't ready yet for volume production. Both Apple and Samsung are actively developing microLED technology.
One cannot overemphasize how genuinely small those microLED chips are. In order to build a 4K display based on microLED, for example, one must assemple 25 million LED chips — each individual chip is the size of "grains of pollen," according to Virey — with a positioning accuracy of ~1 µm, without a single error, noted Yole. That's no cakewalk.
Virey quickly added, “We are not there yet when it comes to volume manufacturing" necessary for commercial displays. The level of microLED technology, however, has improved to a level that allows the industry to deliver prototypes, he explained.