Slashdot Mirror
Sony's OEL Thinner And Better Than Today's LCDs?
Matrium writes: "MSNBC is running an article about Sony's new Slim TV is thinner, brighter, and has a better picture then current LCD screens. The organic electroluminescent (OEL) display is a little thicker then a credit card was showed Wednesday. These screens offer a faster responce then LCD becuase the are self-luminous (no back-lighting required) and allow a wider viewing angle. Sony hopes to have these screens in mass production by 2003." Someday we'll lose our laptops in between pages of books just like we lose plane tickets/notes/phone numbers today.
However, I don't think Sony should be changing the acronymn to sound like their own technology. It is exactly the same thing.
OH MY GOD! sony is trying to confuse the marketplace in order to foster the appearance of them having significant technology when none exist! This is so *NOT* like sony at all!
Ever heard of Beta, MemoryStick, SuperDisk or MiniDisk? sony is the most notorious anti-comeptitive technology hording whore in the tech world. Doesnt anyone remember that a$$hole loudmouth VP "we'll block them at their HD, we'll block them at the monitor, we'll block them at the ISP" nonsense?
Remeber: sony is a member of the RIAA and MPAA and is leading the pack in fighting for the control of our general artistic culture. They dont even like CDRs for god sakes because they can be used to copy audio CDs.
I NEVER BUY ANYTHING MADE BY SONY! I tell people (because I am often asked about such things) to NEVER BUY ANYTHING MADE BY SONY! I dont care how 'cool' sonys products are (frankly I find them rather low quality and crappy for the most part (on the individual electronics end)) I will never buy a piece of sony kit. Ever. I suggest *YOU ALL* do the same.
Tetsuo Urabe, general manager of Sony's OEL development department, said the company would aim to produce OEL screens to match or exceed LCDs in size, price and longevity.
But what seemed strange to me was this comment:
Sony's Urabe set a target of a 10,000-hour life for the screens and expressed confidence that manufacturing processes would pose no insurmountable problems.
10,000 hours is just 417 days. So basically if you use your computer 8 hours a day, the monitor will be dead in 3 years. Most people don't want to fork out ~$1000 for a new monitor that often. I know I plan on keeping my CRT for a lot longer than that.
and Americans get wider!
This sort of thing makes me wonder whatever happened to the Sony Plasmatron of a few years ago. It was based on a plasma switched LCD technology invented by Tektronix, and was supposed to be a way of building large screens using simple printing processes rather than the photolithigraphic semiconductor process used by LCDs, conventinal plasma screens, and thier ilk (including this OLED panel).
The real savings was supposed to be that the elimination of the clean room requirement and processing would allow screens to be almost arbitrarily large and *much* cheaper.
Sony even showed a working prototype at CES several years back (1996?), and said it would be available soon, but the technology has dropped completely out of sight since then.
Anybody know what happened? Inquiring minds want to know...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Besides, who would use a laptop as a bookmark anyway?
Why the hell is it always absolutely necessary to throw in some completely unreleated technology or buzzword when introducing a new technology? I'm just baffled that they didn't find a way to fit wireless or XML in there somehow...
--
EFF Member #11254
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
What I want is an lcd that isn't more fragile than a ming vase. As a practicing homosexual, I've had to replace my vaio 4 times already due to a cracked screen.
That's unacceptable. I've never dropped or even slammed it shut.
With light weight lcd matrices and plastics technology, surely they can build a laptop screen that lasts more than a week.
--Shoeboy
It still isn't cost effective to throw out my 21" (3 ft deep) monitor for the LCD replacement (maybe a $1500 difference?), so why would this new, possibly more expensive option even cross my radar?
Wait and see, wait and see...
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.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Oh, come on Taco. How long do you think we'll have these cute little bound piles of wood? I can't wait till I start losing my book inside my laptop. :)
Sam
I hope I'll be around in the future when you can download a new skin for your car or wallpapers just like you can do with Winamp or Gnome/KDE. The paint on cars, homes and wallpapers will not be regular paint. It made up of some crystal or organic goo that can be altered electronically by an in built chip. To bad your car got hacked the other day. Now it's bright pink with neon green dots and you cannot change it. ;-)
The article states that these displays will be self luminious, but it never mentions how much power they will draw. They aren't going to be very useful for laptops if they draw even more power than todays color LCD displays, which are already power hogs. Sometimes I wish I could buy a monocrome passive matrix laptop (they'd be *cheap* in comparision) that let you turn off the backlite (remember when this was possible) and could be used in bright(er) lighting conditions than todays laptops. Who needs 24bit color to read email, compose a letter or a book, read a book, or even surf the web (if you can surf in Lynx, missing color support in Galeon is a small problem). The biggest feature of all would be the increased battery life. Imagine a Transmeta laptop with a low power LCD (passive matrix monochrome backlit optional) laptop with the same batteries as todays power hogs? It'd run for hours on end.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
I imagine a day when everyone will get a free OEL-wall in their living room... The catch? You'll have to sign up for MSN/WebTV. When you're not using the WebTV, the OEL wall will display targeted advertising.
Laptops keep getting smaller, but the traditional laptop has a limit to how small it can get. A full sized keyboard and a nice 15" screen can be paper thin, and only a few ounces, but will still be 8.5x11". The real future is in the headset/eyepeice screen, with a fold up Palm Style keyboard, and an air mouse pointing device (maybe a tiny device worn on one finger like a ring?) that all communicate wirelessly (and of course are connected to the internet with 802.11 or its descendant.
I have seen the future... and it looks kinda cool, but only if we take some drastic steps to fix this fsck'd up planet.
Reality has a liberal bias
- EInk
- Ritek
- RollTronics
- Universal Display
- Cambridge Display
- Kodak
- and check out this page at Stanford Research
-
This technology has a lot of potential. In my previous post about designing VR hardware, I was thinking the OLEDs would be a good way to do the screens. However, I don't think Sony should be changing the acronymn to sound like their own technology. It is exactly the same thing.http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid