GoKawiilIn a secluded room deep within Samsung Display's headquarters in South Korea, rows of whirring gray and black machines repeatedly fold, flex and stress test the company's newest mobile displays. During a mid-June visit, I was among the first people outside the company to step inside the high-security lab and see how Samsung pushes its foldable screens to their limits before they reach consumers.
On Tuesday, Samsung unveiled Flex Titanium, a new display technology for its upcoming Galaxy foldable phones including the Z Fold 8. It combines a titanium-alloy film with a titanium plate to create a thinner, more durable display structure designed to better withstand drops and other impacts -- an important consideration for foldable phones that can cost thousands of dollars.
Samsung Display designs and manufactures screens for Samsung Electronics as well as competitors including Apple, and has become one of the industry's leading developers of flexible and advanced display technology. Beyond commercial products, the company regularly showcases futuristic display concepts for phones, tablets and other devices.
Watch this: I Went Inside Samsung's Secret Display Lab and Saw Its Wildest Phone Concepts 03:16
As Samsung makes its foldable phones thinner -- last year's Galaxy Z Fold 7 measures an impressively slim 4.2mm when open -- the company is looking for ways to scale back various components to maintain a sleek profile. Samsung says it spent about three years developing Flex Titanium technology while examining customer feedback across seven generations of its foldable phones.
"We have to understand user behavior and various display challenges like dropping or pressure with a large object or a tiny object," Samsung executive vice president Byung Duk Yang said in an interview. "Because of that, we have developed a very comprehensive and sophisticated evaluation method to understand user behavior in the real world."
These are the machines that fold Samsung's displays hundreds of thousands of times to ensure durability. Samsung
Testing the endurance of foldable displays
As we navigated the maze-like, pristine white hallways snaking below Samsung Display's headquarters in Korea, about 20 miles from Seoul, our guide touted the exclusivity of what we'd be seeing. No one outside the company -- not even the employee's mom and dad -- had been here, she said as she led us into the testing lab.
In this secluded room, which only engineers enter, equipment runs around the clock, folding and unfolding display panels to ensure they can pass 500,000 folding tests. Once the metal latch is closed, the Z Fold 8 panels (there are four inside right now) are subjected to extreme temperatures ranging from -20 degrees to 60 degrees Celsius (or -4 degrees to 140 degrees Fahrenheit). It's not just the displays that are tested for durability. The hinges that power the folding mechanism also need to withstand repeated stress.
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