New And Improved LCDs

Ender42 writes "Princeton scientists have created a variety of light-emitting materials that could greatly accelerate the development of flat-panel computer screens and other compact video displays. The discovery, a feat of engineering materials at the level of quantum mechanics, also may yield insights into the basic properties of light-emitting substances. " Practically speaking this means cheaper, higher res, lower power LCD displays. "

Comments

Re:High Res

[Foogle]

While I wouldn't go so far as to rule something like that out, I would ask: Why would you want to?

Running 1600x1200 on a 15" LCD screen would be unbearable. It's almost too small for my 21" CRT... The only answer to that would be to make the laptop screen bigger, but again I ask: why would you want to? Making a laptop screen bigger than 15" makes it awful clumsy. Sure, everyone wants a big screen, but who wants a big laptop? Not me. I'll stick with 1024x768 screens on my laptops, thanks.

Having said all that, this technology could easily help out in bringing flatscreen monitors to the world's desktops.

-----------

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

Excellent, now we just need to get...

[smoondog]

I use one of the high res SGI flat panels (1600x1024, I think) and I love it, except for one problem, OS support. Believe it or not, the dpi is so high and the screen is so bright, that it gives me eyestrain very easily. Even with the largest fonts on Winbloze, they are still much smaller (but very clear!) than on my crappy 15" 1024x768 monitor at home. I wonder when we are going to see a decent solution to this problem. Not just fonts but true scalability! Window borders, icons, etc would all be the same dimensions relative to the monitor size. It is what is needed next, I wonder how long till we get it?

-- Moondog

OLED

[kwashiorkor]

This breakthrough though is very interesting. Visions of wearable computers based on cheaply manufactured monocles seem to be creeping ever closer to reality :-)

For more info about OLED, look on Kodak's site:
http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/produc ts/specialProducts/OEL/oelIndex.shtm l

But here's a product that puts to practice a real breakthrough in flat panel display technology. (though I'm not sure about it's power consumption).

iFire Flat Panel Displays
Compared with most other flat panel technologies, an iFire flat panel display is a very simple device. It does not involve vacuum like CRT and FED; gases like PDP; or liquids like LCD. This results in reduced susceptibility to shock, vibration and breakage. Unlike LCD that relies on multiple fluorescent tubes to light up the display, iFire flat panel displays emit light from the front portion of the display. This results in a wider viewing angle and a crisper, clearer image. The simple screen printing methods also translate into lower costs, and higher yields, thus producing an affordable flat panel display for the mass consumer market.
http://www.ifire.com/technology/compar e.html

-- kwashiorkor --
Pure speculation gets you nowhere.

Not the limiting factor

[Captn Pepe]

As far as making huge/affordable flat panel displays goes, the light-emitting material really isn't the limiting factor. The major trouble fabricating these devices in a cost-effective manner is the interconnects that deliver signal to each pixel individually. While this isn't an especially technically challenging problem, it's very expensive to do. So, sure, a cell of OLED may very well turn out to be cheaper to make than an LCD pixel (which may or may not be the case -- mostly depends on how cheaply the OLED compounds can be made and stably bonded to the substrate), but this won't drastically cut the cost of building displays.

That said, this technology does (as the article correctly emphasizes) enable the construction of much lower-power displays than what is currently used. LEDs have very low heat dissipation, which translates into less wasted current, especially when compared to the heat put out by an LCD backlight. Also, without a backlight, you can make the panel somewhat thinner, so the various comments about using this to make headmount or pda/cellphone displays are probably right on track as to where OLEDs will end up being important.

Still some work to do yet

[Foomaster]

This small-molecule organic display business is quite good, and Forrest is a great researcher in this field, but I think the best is yet to come. I work with light-emitting polymers at UCSB, and I just wanted to comment that in terms of processability and general 'toughness' (i.e. resistance to physical damage) polymer displays will be the ones used in your palm pilots and cel phones. Of course, the only polymer displays that I have seen working have been one color devices for cel phones, so full color is still a ways off yet. Another thing to note is that while it is great to see someone from my field make it to slashdot's front page with what appears to be 'industry-ready' technology, no-one has commented on the great drawback of organic displays (both small-molecule and polymer)- they are tremendously air and UV sensitive. If left exposed to air and normal light, these materials can degrade very rapidly, and engineering an protective layer is not as easy as you think (i.e. you can't just coat it in a transparent polymer layer - oxygen can still diffuse through it). Just be patient for a year or so, and then start looking for this stuff commercially. As a side note to all this, light-emitting polymers can be made into solar-cells with a little modification, so keep your eyes peeled for some light and cheap solar cells in the near future!

Correction

[Silicon_Knight]

If you read the article, you can see that this is *NOT* for LCD use. It's an L*E*D display.

LCD displays work by having an optically active (chiral) organic molecule layer (called the liquid crystal) sandwiched bewteeen 2 layers of polarizing filters, set at 90 degrees angle. When a current is applied the orientation of the liquid crystal layer changes, and the light's polarization plane doesn't get rotated the 90 degrees to clear the second filter. (Thus appearing to be dark). Take away the voltage, the crystals returns to ground state, plane polarized light is rotated 90 degrees, and it clears the second filter and appears to be transparent. This is how LCD displays on calculators work; color displays built on this principle and add a backlight on the back (ie, laptop) and by controlling the amount of light that passes thru for each pixel, generates the different colors. Note that the light emmision criteria has nothing to do with the liquid crystals; that's why you can't read your calculator in a dark room, and that's why palm devices have a backlight. Another cool thing to try is to take a polarizing sunglasses and hold it between your eye and the laptop screen and rotate it slowly. The display will get darker (at 90 deg) and brighter again (at a full 180 deg).

Now that we have amused ourselves with LCD technology, let's take a look at what these guys at Princeton actually did:

They found a new material that can be used in light emitting diodes. LEDs are used for indicator lights on the electronics that we all love. Traditionally, LED displays for flat panel applications are problematic for 2 reasons:

A: Making the pixels small enough, on a large display.
B: Finding a materials for blue LEDs.

The problem with blue LEDs was solved a few years back, but as far as I know A is still a limitation. If you ever look at those big "SonyTron" LED displays in stadiums, up close the pixels are about the size of your THUMB.

In order for this to suceed, there needs to be a good commercial process to apply the OLED material onto an (ideally) plastic substrate. Plastic substrates are really the way to go because they are less prone to breakage and don't require massive retooling. Hopefully, since the material is organic in nature, incorporating it onto plastic won't be such a difficult idea.

-=- Terence