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That and this together could make for an interesting tent one day, amongst other things. Add in flexible displays etc and you could be applying for research grants from DoD and DHS. Portable command centers anyone? Portable geek huts?

Personally, I'm still waiting for PLED panels.

They've still got development to do. 260,000 colours aren't enough!

They will do 24 bits in no time and you will see them in laptops PDA's cameras and cell phones sooner than you think.
for more info on LEP/OLED displays try these...
Universal display
cambridge display tech
high efficency
transparent
flexible
stacked hi res

and some apps...
# Low-power, bright, colorful cell phones
# Full color, high-resolution, personal communicators
# Wrist-mounted, featherweight, rugged PDAs
# Wearable, form-fitting, electronic displays
# Full-color, high resolution, portable Internet devices and palm size computers
# High-contrast automotive instrument and windshield displays
# Heads-up instrumentation for aircraft and automobiles
# Automobile light systems without bulbs
# Flexible, lightweight, thin, durable, and highly efficient laptop screens
# Roll-up, electronic, daily-refreshable newspaper
# Ultra-lightweight, wall-size television monitor
# Office windows, walls and partitions that double as computer screens
# Color-changing lighting panels and light walls for home and office
# Low-cost organic lasers
# Computer-controlled, electronic shelf pricing for supermarkets and retail stores
# Smart goggles/helmets for scuba divers, motorcycle riders
# Medical test equipment
# Wide area, full-motion video camcorders
# Global positioning systems (GPS)
# Integrated computer displaying eyewear
# Rugged military portable communication devices

My favorite is the high efficency ceiling mount. Need white light [click] there you are. Want a change of pace go for blue sky with puffy white coulds [click] done.

These products are supposed to be cheap enough to do these things once mass production has begun.

The parent is correct, it certainly is not the first time that light has ever been generated from a molecule by applying electricity!

I refer you to the parent's link and Cambrige Display Technology. Both are well on the way in the development of applications for simple polymer molecules that emit light when a current is passed.

I know that the simplest LEP Cambridge Display Technologies discovered (PPV) is of a similar scale (if not even smaller in diameter) to nanotubes, however I can't compare efficiencies, nor do I know much about optoelectronics so I couldn't say how a wavelength of 1.5 microns (the emission quoted in the article) compares to those of LEPs (visible light so between 400 and 700 nanometers).

My point is that I dispute the article's claim that it is the first time that molecules have produced light when an electrical potential is placed across them. Perhaps IBM think that nanotube light emission is more suited to optoelectronics than OLEDS/LEPs.

If you want to learn more about LEPs I did a project on them as part of my Chemistry degree, it's hosted by the Royal Society of Chemistry here and a slightly more up-to-date but not as pretty version is hosted here

Polymers tend to degrade with exposure to light, especially UV. In a display UV is not generally a problem but obviously light in general is.

Paul.

Insert wisecrack about Minority Report here.

a technical overview

Cambridge Display Technologies has a nice article
describing the underlying physics and some technical issues involved with developing the material.

--LP

Cambridge Display Technologies has a nice article
describing the underlying physics and some technical issues involved with developing the material.

--LP

This is Cambrige Display Technology's white paper on how Light Emitting Polymers function.

I wonder if these can get high enough res. to be useful for laptop/handheld displays? That would sure be handy...

-Zordok

People may like to look at the website of Cambridge Display Technology, who invented LEPs.

Lower power consumption means that the thing requires less power. It does not directly mean that things will be built with the same size batteries. With the decreased power consumption, manufacturers can scale down the size of the batteries, meaning it costs them less to manufacture, and bringing down the overall weight and size of the device.

This has more significant advantages on things that aren't constrained by keyboards and hard drives. PDAs are a prime example. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'd guess that batteries are a significant amount of the weight in many of them.

If they do pull this off, and it's not another LEP (Light Emitting Polymer, which made the cheaper/lower power/better viewing angle/no backlighting/higher res claims 5 years ago), then I'd personally rather have them take a single battery, and give us twice as many battery slots. [Single batteries suck, as do ones they are keyed by the bay, as you can't rotate through 3 batteries easily]

from an article at dpreview.com (examining a different OEL being produced by Sanyo and Kodak:)

The new 5.5-inch panel has a quarter-VGA resolution (240 x 320 pixels) with a brightness of 200 candela per square meter. It consumes 2 watts running at 10 volts. Yoneda claimed that the power consumption is lower than comparably-sized LCDs, which eat 2.5 W on average. The pixel transistors are optimized to maintain uniform brightness over the surface of the panel. The aperture ratio is about 50 percent, an improvement over the 30 percent ratio of the earlier 2.4-inch panel.

and this, from the University of Arizona's Optical Sciences Center (discussing Organic LEDs, full authors' credits on page:)

Recently, organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) have attracted a lot of attention, mainly due to their simplicity of fabrication, low operating voltage and power consumption, large view angle, high brightness and efficiency, ultra-thin structure, mechanical flexibility, and light weight.1 Their potential use in display applications, such as ultra-thin flat panel, roll-up, and head-mounted displays is being seriously considered by numerous companies.

So to answer your question, it looks like the technology as it currently stands performs roughly as well as backlit LCDs, with perhaps even a slight advantage. This technology takes the middleman of backlighting out of the equation by using electroluminescent materials in the first place. Thus, the above claims make some sense, as you are only pumping power to the pixels themselves, and not the pixels and the backlight.

On a bit of a tangent, this looks to be similar to the LEP technology Slashdot reported about some time ago (see Cambridge Display's homepage for more info.)

First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.

• EInk
• Ritek
• RollTronics
• Universal Display
• Cambridge Display
• Kodak
• and check out this page at Stanford Research

They look for printing as a cheap manufacturing technique of polymer displays. I asked Friend if polymers could take over silicon in other areas of electronics like CPUs, he said they would be far too slow for that. But maybe some day..

Anyway, the polymer displays look interesting, for one thing the viewing angles are not limited at all. And imagine a tiny laptop with a decent sized roll-up display..

--

There's some potential here, I think...

information wants to be expensive...nothing is so valuable as the right information at the right time.

Does the original article talk about this thing, or some another development?

The light-emitting elements will also be significantly cheaper, and as has been pointed out, will require less power, fewer manufacturing steps, and will be capable of creating much larger displays in the future than Plasma or any other silicon-based technology:Light-emitting polymers broaden display options. In addition, companies like Cambridge Display Technology are working on ink-jettable organic light-emitting polymer technology that will allow the manufacture of cheap displays of any size, allowing entire animated video billboards.

I'd pay $500 every 3-5 years for a 60-inch(or larger) screen.

This article in zdnet Australia has some of the details, and describes the fact the the displays are made with a "specialty printer that can shoot red, blue and green polymer inks ... from three separate cartridges, then mix with a fourth cartridge that contains a conductive polymer. The printer "prints" small drops of the four inks onto a thin screen, which combined with electrodes will make an LEP display.", says that these displays will have about 200dpi and states that "Best of all, Seiko-Epson is working on a mammoth printer that will create screens 15 feet across with no seams and without the staggering yield problems that plague LCD technology."

At the moment these displays are created sandwiched in glass, but to be released commercially, they need to be able to be set in plastic. Still mighty impressive. The CDT website has a lot of technical papers on how these LEP's work, and interesting read.

This article in zdnet Australia has some of the details, and describes the fact the the displays are made with a "specialty printer that can shoot red, blue and green polymer inks ... from three separate cartridges, then mix with a fourth cartridge that contains a conductive polymer. The printer "prints" small drops of the four inks onto a thin screen, which combined with electrodes will make an LEP display.", says that these displays will have about 200dpi and states that "Best of all, Seiko-Epson is working on a mammoth printer that will create screens 15 feet across with no seams and without the staggering yield problems that plague LCD technology."

At the moment these displays are created sandwiched in glass, but to be released commercially, they need to be able to be set in plastic. Still mighty impressive. The CDT website has a lot of technical papers on how these LEP's work, and interesting read.

Here is looking forward to lovely LEPs (Light Emitting Ploymers) replacing all the damned CRTs and LCDs.

And for all you naysayers...I have a hard time picturing all the possible uses for this stuff, should it be possible to make it bendable. My prediction is that LEPs are going to change the appearance of the whole world.

Possibility 1: LEP wallpaper; imagine you want to change the color of your room...suddenly your whole house is as customizable as your computer's desktop...housethemes.org anyone? how about carthemes.org?

Possibility 2: The chameleon suit from predator, that instantly becomes any outfit you want it to be.

Possibility 3: the one-page daily newspaper, with every page in full color, fully customizable.

Not to mention all the advertising possibilites. ugh, distracting full motion billboards everywhere you go.

Epson has ALREADY developed a printer that will print RGB LEPs onto a sheet of glass...and Nokia should be releasing phones with the new LEP (full-color) screens shortly.

This is the link for the company that has created the process.

I read about it in whatever took the place of PC Computing (can't remember the new name). Here is a link to a related story I posted in an earlier discussion. Additionally, This is a link showing some of the LEP displays.

At first I was under the impression that these two articles were covering differing technologies since they both came from the same source just a month or so apart, but then I thought about double posting of stories here on slashdot a month or so apart.....

carlos

I read about it in whatever took the place of PC Computing (can't remember the new name). is a link to a related story I posted in an earlier discussion. Additionally, is a link showing some of the LEP displays.

At first I was under the impression that these two articles were covering differing technologies since they both came from the same source just a month or so apart, but then I thought about double posting of stories here on slashdot a month or so apart.....

carlos

...go to the CDT website. It answers all the above questions and more.

Who have a press release here

this has been about for at least a year now, and green for a couple of years. heres an artical from december 98 Cambridge claims blue light emitting polymer and heres a good one from feb 98 it clames that Seiko-Epson and Cambridge Display Technology were working on a momocrome version.
want to find out more .

If you really want to know about the light emitting polymer go here to CDT's (the people who are developing the product) website.
For another article (related, with interesting technical specs) try here

Incidentally, the specs on this page show that its luminosity (max) is about the same of a TFT display.

{shhhhh... the froggies are asleep.}
spam-proofing?

Their press release gives some details about how they're creating displays for use (currently) on small handheld devices, but suggests that they could easily be scaled up for use in larger devices.

"The pre-production colour light emitting polymer display being shown by CDT and Seiko-Epson has a colour density similar to current LCDs. The techniques being jointly developed by the two companies means that the manufacturing cost of an LEP display will be significantly less than the cost of producing conventional LCD or cathode ray tube displays," said Dr. Shimoda, general manager of basic research, Seiko-Epson.

Whether or not this technology will be used in the future to really lower the price of laptops is to be seen in the future, but it seems like something cool.

Their press release gives some details about how they're creating displays for use (currently) on small handheld devices, but suggests that they could easily be scaled up for use in larger devices.

"The pre-production colour light emitting polymer display being shown by CDT and Seiko-Epson has a colour density similar to current LCDs. The techniques being jointly developed by the two companies means that the manufacturing cost of an LEP display will be significantly less than the cost of producing conventional LCD or cathode ray tube displays," said Dr. Shimoda, general manager of basic research, Seiko-Epson.

Whether or not this technology will be used in the future to really lower the price of laptops is to be seen in the future, but it seems like something cool.

For a run down see

Cambridge Display Technologies - Technical Info

it gives a good technical overview of the technology.

Effectively since it is all on a polymer substrate they can make screens into an shape or size, e.g. a Display wrapped around a glass!

IIRC they had problems with premature burnout, i.e. after about ~5000 hours the display quality deteriorated rapidly. QFX

The problems appear to be with colour purity and stability. Building a small prototype is one thing, but a mass-market display with a 10,000 hour active life is quite another.

Also, the flexibility is probably being oversold. These things will bend around a limited radius, possibly small enough to roll up, but don't expect animated clothing any time soon.

But yes, once they get the chemistry sorted out this is a good contender for the display technology of the next century.

Paul.

One day you will be able to buy tins of this stuff to paint over anything you like, like a younger brother, and from your local DIY store! Excellent....

More seriously, how does this compare with the LEP technology from CDT that has been recently developed? LEP is a currently working display technology, it is only 1 layer deep (compared with 3 layers for LCD displays) and thus costs a lot less to make. I think it also has the potential to be put onto flexible materials. Within the next year or so you will be able to get devices incorporating this technology (such as mobile phones, hi-res screen watches etc) and soon maybe notebook screens.

Makes me think, if a notebook screen was foldable, then instead of making the screen wider (thus making the case bigger and less notebook-like), you could make the screens higher, maybe analogous to a sheet of A3 paper, but not have to have an absolutely huge case to carry around...

Also great for animated temporary tattoos I am sure! Stick on the tattoo, it powers itself from your body heat (or static electricity or something I have forgotten what) and then you get a video of Slayer/Steps/Sinatra/Porn playing on your arm or whatever!