# Samsung's second smart glasses put text on the lens

Source: https://idevice.com/samsungs-second-smart-glasses-put-text-on-the-lens
Published: 2026-09-09

> The panel Samsung has asked for is 0.2 inches or smaller and renders 16 brightness steps per color, enough for arrows and not photographs.

Samsung asked Samsung Display last month for a microdisplay no larger than 0.2 inches.

A microdisplay is a screen roughly the size of a fingernail that sits inside the frame of a pair of glasses. An optical system magnifies it and throws the picture into the middle of your view. The Elec, a Korean industry publication, reported the request. It sets out the size, the active display area, the color the panel has to reproduce and the price Samsung wants to pay.

Samsung has not shipped its first pair of glasses and has already ordered the screen for its second.

The color target is the number worth reading twice. Samsung is asking for four-bit gradation, which means 16 brightness levels per color channel. A phone screen works in 256. Sixteen is enough for white text, a system icon and a navigation arrow with a hard edge on it, and nowhere near enough for a photograph. Samsung isn't building a television you wear.

Placement is where this separates from what Meta already sells. Meta's Ray-Ban Display sits its panel off to one side of the lens, so you glance across to read it. Samsung wants the information directly in front of the eye.

The panel technology isn't settled. Industry opinion favors W-OLEDoS, which grows white OLED on a silicon base and lays color filters over the top, because factories already build it at yields that make money. The alternatives are better and harder. RGB OLEDoS produces color directly with no filter and costs far more to manufacture. LEDoS is brighter than either, but full color on it at volume is still unsolved.

Samsung also hasn't decided if the display goes in front of one eye or both. That choice sets the battery, the weight on the bridge of the nose and the price, and it is still open.

The hardest part is width. Getting a usable field of view across the lens, without wrecking the color or the cost, is the problem the panel request is really asking suppliers to solve.

The glasses are planned for the second half of 2027, and the window being given is late 2027 or early 2028.