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Organic LEDs to Supercede LCDs?
Hootie Hoo writes "Tech Review.com is reporting that a new screen display method may soon make LCD screens a thing of the past. Organic light-emitting diodes are brighter, thinner, lighter, and faster than liquid crystal displays. They also take less power to run, offer higher contrast, look equally bright from all angles and have the potential to be much cheaper to manufacture than their conventional counterparts." We had a story about these LEDs last year.
Two can play at your game. If you want to nitpick others, try to at least be free of that which you criticize people for.
Universal Display Corporation does OLED R their site has information about the variations on this technology (FOLED, SOLED, TOLED, etc.)
Organic displays don't come from animals, they grow on trees.
No little fluffy rabbits are hurt, it's just like eating an apple.
But perhaps you don't know: the vacuum tube on normal CRTs is made by a very cruel use of kittens. That's why all CRT are produced in Asia, they don't care much for cats there.
We didn't have all these new-fangled colour screens, 32-bit processors or email when I was young. We had a cardboard box with "Computer" written on the side, but we were happy.
Kind of like that electronic paper? It has small balls which are white on one side and black on the other. Passing a current accross them makes them flip, creating a black or white point on the paper. I guess in theory you could produce red, green and blue balls, and vary the amount that they get flipped, making a colour display.
IBM's second generation (but still completely useless) linux watch uses an OLED for all the reasons mentioned here: bright display, low batter consumption, etc. Check out the CNet article.
My other computer is your Windows box
Actually, it's the same LEP's. (well, in part) Same basic materials. They're just still getting better. So it isn't that their claims didn't pan out, but that development is still going forward. Now actually usable displays are being made, even if not competetively with LCD's. 5 years ago it was all talk. Seems to me things are on track.
Simply taking the light from point a and passing it onto point b on the diametricall opposite side works as a method of invisibility _only_ if you have a static viewing angle. If the viewer looks at you from a lightly different angle, point b is no longer diametrically opposed to point a and the illusion is obvious.
_____
My Journal
Last September.
From the article: "The first phone to hit the market with an organic light-emitting diode display is Motorola's $300 Timeport P8767, which went on sale last September."
MIT has some research on some kind of electric ink - it looks like an ordinary paper but you can light [the equivalent of] pixels. Last I heard, they only had greyscale.
A few links:
Salon article
E-Ink
More info should be available at www.media.mit.edu, but it seems to be down for the moment.
:wq!
A horde of lightning bugs all grab their asses in terror.
I've already got the blue balls, but I'm not too excited about getting the red and green balls...
Polymers == chains of carbon molecules. Cabon based molecules == organic. Carbon chemistry == organic chemistry. "Organic stuff" == polymers == carbon based molcule chains == organic chemicals. Pay attention in chemistry class.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I believe the term for these was OEL displays (Organic Electro-Luminescent)
Conceptually that sounds easy. Since what they do is rotate a tiny ball in its socket (one side black/ the other white) all you need to do is paint each ball with four different colors (e.g., CMYK). There might be a problem with intensity, as I'm not sure of the size of the cuff of the socket, but then perhaps that's transparent.
FWIW, I'm not certain that this system is the one that you are talking about, but it's one of the approaches. Called smart paper, or some such. The problem is, black/white is just North/South. Magnets do that easily. Getting the finer discrimination is a bit trickier.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Electronic ink already exists in prototype. There's a store in Boston that uses a multiple-message sign utilizing it. :)
I'm really looking forward to consumer applications of it, too - finally, no more having to carry around pounds of books on vacation...
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
This one isn't vaporware. While it's certainly mis-represented in the /. article, organic LEDs are intended right now to be used mainly in cell phones. You can actually purchase one of these puppies Today. They're looking at low use devices right now because of problems with the life of the display. No one's claiming that it will replace your laptop screen tomorrow.
As is pointed out 1000 times in the responses to any article about Transmeta, reducing processor power consumption alone won't give you a notebook with great battery life. The display has been a big reason for that.
If OLEDs live up to their promise, low-power processors like Crusoe will become much more attractive.
I get about 4 hours out of my Thinkpad A21 battery.
because you are a standard Slashdotter,
The big draw back right now seems to be the useful life of the display. The numbers given by the article are a current maximum of around 1,000 hours for the blue, 100,000 for the red and 30,000(?) for the green.
My question is, would it be possible to make the displays cheap enough that they would be disposable? The article talks about advances that may make it possible to print the displays on presses much like a newspaper is printed. Would it be possible to put the control circuitry in a holder, with the OLED and substrate being on a removable plate that slid in and out? If the display replacement could be dropped to around $20, I would replace it every few months (and get used to a red/green display when funds are low 8*)
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Actually, the article did make a mention of animals in reference to current LCD screen technology: "Full-color displays also require expensive red/green/blue filters made of dichromated gelatin--fish glue." So I would imagine that PETA will recommend a laptop boycot soon ;-)
- Crusadio
color increases the information density of a display. Take a good road map and photocopy it in black and white. It is still usable, but much less so. For PDA mapping, color is essential, since so much more data must be crammed into less area.
When used simply as decoration color can be a problem. Used with restraint it has excellent applications, such as the simple way blue and purple underlined text are used to represent links on a web page. Of course if the text is spangled with random color and typographic oddities then color capability would be a drawback, because its just one more distracting miscue.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
does anyone, anywhere up there have a spell checker? I mean; supercede? Supersede is the only word in English that ends with "sede". This has been a paid public service announcement from the grammar police.
----- Protect your rights, join the eff
A company called Alien Technology has developed a very low power display technology that looks very promising. There was a write-up in the February Scientific American about it.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Actually, at that point you'd need cyan, magenta, yellow and black balls---for printing on paper one uses a subtractive colour model rather than the additive RGB model.
I want. Unfortunately, to get it today, you have to move to Japan, where most cool tech hits the consumer world first.
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
Oops; memory fault. I should have reviewed that bookmark before I posted it; the 'today' part is false advertising. However, it is still good English coverage of the Japanese phone displays that are mentioned briefly in the techreview article.
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
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]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
To adjust them properly, get your computer to display an all black screen, and starting with the black level all the way down, turn it up until you just start to see the display get brighter. Then display an all white screen and adjust the white balance until it's the same brightness as a piece of paper/whiteboard/etc held up next to your monitor. BTW, the color temperature control should be set to whatever makes the paper and the white screen look the same color.
Gah, not enough large cell-phone screenshots available for that Timeport.
ah, here is some more info.
Yeah, print it out on a printer, then realise that your oled cartridge has a blocked pin so it doesn't work.
:-)
I can see HPs future range:
Plain Black Cartridge
Color Cartridge
Photo Color Cartridge
Monochrome OLED Cartridge (works on T-Shirts!)
Color OLED Cartridge
One day the OLED Cartridge will cost less than the photo cartidge....
You mean 100,000 hours for red, 30,000 hours for green and 1,000 hours for blue, don't you?
:-) Especially with red and green highlights available.
Which means that you could get some wicked yellow/red/green displays that will last over 3 years before the green starts giving out. Great for mobile phones and PDAs in my opinion.
Especially if they are higher res than the current technology. A Palm in yellow-scale will suit me fine, if it is running at 640x640
hey,
:)
after they red burns out, you could put some of that red reynolds wrap over it and just pretend
--
microsoft, it's what's for dinner
bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
it's a sig, wtf?
You can find out more about OLED from the company working on it, Universal Display Corporation
Gasp!
Another amazing - change the world - technology was posted to Slashdot! OK. Time to hold my breath.
From the article:
... their structure is about as simple as one could imagine: an electrode, some organic stuff, then another electrode. Hook it up to a voltage and, presto, out comes light.
Does anyone know precisely what this "organic stuff" is? The article mentions polymers, but I'd like a more specific description.
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
Yeah.. Let's never ever do anything more than once. Went out partying last week, why should I go out anymore.. oh wait, it was fun. And there is always something new like different people.. Last year was three months ago at the earliest. Even without any new information it is still an interesting topic.
Fer chrissakes, can someone PLEASE make a 19" flatscreen monitor that uses these? I know everyone would appreciate it :)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Just because they use organic materials doesn't mean that they torture the animals to death. In fact, I'm not even sure they use animals... the article didn't give any mention of where the organic material for the new displays comes from (the old LCD technology, they said, used "fish glue"). The organic material for the new displays could just as easily be coming from plants (plants which were not doubt tortured to death).
It's also possible that if they were to use something like "fish glue," that they would aquire the needed material via the cheapest means possible, like buying waste material (heads, tails, skin) from a food processing plant (e.g., VanDeKamps).
Feel free to say "we" all breathe air, or that all of us are alive when we are existant and non-dead. Don't assume I enjoy having my montor blasting vast quantities of unwanted luminescence at my skull though.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Sorry, I forgot to include the standard link to babelfish. We shouldn't think that everybody knows what we know...
This sig is stolen from someone who had a much better idea than I had.
Hi, there was an article (in german) yesterday on heise.de about plastic displays on Cebit, so if you happen to be there today or tomorrow, you might want to see them.
This sig is stolen from someone who had a much better idea than I had.
What if one of them gets sick like the gelpacks on Voyager did that time?
By the way, the grammar in you post is terrible.
Hmm, talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
ChodaBoy
ChodaBoy
- The preceding statement is the product of a deranged mind and the sole property of the voices in my head.
I just read about this in umm... err.. The magazine "Science" I believe, and it all sounds great. Brighter, thinner, faster, cheaper, less power, etc... I was extatic.
Then, they let out the bombshell at the end of the article. They only last for something like 1000 hours of use (i.e. 1000 hrs of time accumulated while on).
That just sucks. The article did mention that they would use them first in cell phones, because the actual usage time of the display would be adequate for the typical life of a cell phone (I suppose if they figure that people replace them after 2 years or so).
Now, if these displays can really be a WHOLE lot cheaper than LCD displays are now, maybe they can produce and integrate them such that you can just pop out your old used up display and pop in a brand new one. I wonder if they can be re-charged somehow - i.e. you can send them back to the factory to be refurbished.
There's no reason it can't incorporate a light source as well, which can be turned off when not needed.
It may prove in the long run to be cheaper than OLED technology, however, it is neither as bright (right now) nor can it be made flexible like OLEDs (at least not from what I understand).
Check it out
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
Fuck it
Alien Technology may be a hoax. From their site: "One of the visitors from Klingon reportedly commented that "I seldom come to Earth - even to Silicon Valley - because there is so little useful technology. Alien, however, may have developed the most important technology since the Romulans developed cloaking. We are considering an investment of up to 1 million bars of gold-pressed latinum in Alien's current financing round.""
Try it! Hold a piece of white paper next to your display. Which is brighter? Unless you are in a very dimly lit place, the paper will be brighter.
it would be interesting if an inkjet could print such screens - imagine printing the screen you like on paper and then, while the paper is still wet, press the screen against your own body (your skin) and then attach a very small computer to the output wires (also printed and pasted onto yourself) and you have a living organism-chamelion. The invisibility is then just one step beyond - all you need is some cameras spread around the surface evenly. The cameras would capture the way the surrounding environment emmits light and would reemmit the same light from the opposite side of your body. So if someone looks at you from any side, they see you but you are like a repeater - you reemmit the light that was comming at you from the other side and so the observer would only see what he/she would have seen if you weren't even there. (Of-course it would not be easy to make this completely bullet proof, since you are not a flat surface but there are lots of cavins and cave-outs, but a close enough effect could be attained, that would look something like the alien from Predator (another Schwartznegger's movie))
You can't handle the truth.
Dont you see how important it is that we can make little plastic lights out of different stuff? It`ll literally transform computing! You no longer have to have a red light telling you that the tv you are watching is turned on - it can be any colour! This stuff is gonna shift units you mark my words!
Why would anybody _need_ to chug out 60 FPS? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the human eye a bit slower than that (30 FPS or less, IIRC)? If your hardware can keep up a steady 30 FPS, even in the worst of fragpits, why worry? Seems a bit of a waste if you ask me. Interesting piece along the same lines of this post - http://209.221.153.90/hate/lang/suck.html
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
Thanks. I didn't know that...I'd always heard that 30 was it, no strings attatched. Makes sense though. Now I just gotta build a rig that can handle 60 FPS...heh. Eh, well, not everyone's computer can be a demigod, too bad I'm one of the 'not everyone'.
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
Its great to see they are using new organic LEDs - they work so much better than the ones covered in pesticides... Anyway. The real, real question is have they managed to get refresh rates fast enough to play games yet? I see 'faster', but not enough details to see if it can keep up with 60fps Counterstrike games. Going back to the recent story about grips, LAN parties are held back mainly by the monitor bulk, not machine size.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Its marked as 'flamebait' because it is. 'Organic' simply means that it uses organic compounds. NOT animals. Did you skip chemistry at school?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I agree color displays are currently hard on the eyes. What I would LIKE to see is a color display that doesn't emit ANY light. I want the pixels to change color and appear as any normal object, not a big flat light. Books don't emit light, why should a computer display? I know, I know. Easier said than done. If I'm still breathing when such tech comes around, I'll be one of the first to grab it.
--
So now scientists have found yet another way to exploit animals for profit. I wonder if anyone ever stopped to consider the ethical implications of organic leds, or of organic computing in general ?
Think for a second, Petunia. Like non-organic computing is so great the environment, and other living things? there's a lot of bad chemicals/other crap that gets dumped from making computers and displays. MAYBE going organic will CUT THAT DOWN A LITTLE BIT.
The problem with these is that they still have to emit light. There are two problems with this. The first is that they use power (not much, but some). Second (if my memory of my User Interface Design course serves me right) the eye is not designed to focus on emmitted light, it prefers reflected. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, but it is why it is nicer to read a book, than a computer screen (if you ignore the refresh problem). LCDs, while being able to work on reflected light, just loos too much of the light they reflect, too many layers or something (have to ask my sister, Phd in LCD physics).
The ideal display would be one where you could have a surface that had good reflective properties and could be dynamically changed. I know that MIT are working on a n ink system that you can effectively turn on and off by running it through a kind of laser printer, allowing you to repeatedly re-print onto a piece of paper (I think they managed to reprint hundreds of thousands of times without degredation). If you could do that quickly without the extra machinery then you would have the perfect display, god knows how you would get colour though. mabey some kind of electrically sensetive pigment. Obviously you would have to light it, but only as much as a paper book.
Paul Leader
Part of the problem is that there's an awful lot of readers here who would say something along these lines and mean every word of it. Hard to tell the difference between a troll and an idiot, though the correct response is the same for both cases :)
--
Dyolf Knip
What I would LIKE to see is a color display that doesn't emit ANY light.
The screens used in the GameBoy Color (and Advance, for that matter) and the iPaq are completely passive, reflective-only color LCDs. That is why you can play Tetris in the sun and still see it. The screens work really well, and I'm kind of surprised they don't make full-sized monitors out of them.
I may have been trolled but didn't anyone else find this funny?
Oh, I forgot. You're Americans. You think that "Irony" is an adjective.
Ok, but being Organic, what does it cost to feed and care for them?
How dare they treat "organic compounds" in this manner! Has P.E.T.A. been notified?
Or would it be P.E.T.O.C. that needs to be notified"?
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
You should respect the materials scientists and materials engineers. They don't make things; They make things better.
By the way, the grammar in you post is terrible. Please us capitalization and punctuation in all of your future posts.
Thank you.
Keeping
Sorry about replying in almost entirely questions.
Assumption first blinds a man, then sends him running
Looks like a moderator has had a sense-of-humour bypass... (or a sense-of-humor bypass, depending upon which side of the pond they happen to be at the time).
Ho hum.
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
Maybe now we have a technology that's bright and crisp enough to make panels like they have in Star Trek. Now all we have to do is invent Warp Drive.
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
I agree color displays are currently hard on the eyes. What I would LIKE to see is a color display that doesn't emit ANY light. I want the pixels to change color and appear as any normal object, not a big flat light. Books don't emit light, why should a computer display?
While this would really be interesting to see, I think it would be extremely annoying very quickly.
Most computer systems can be used in daylight or in the dark. You can carry one from inside a dark building, out into the daylight, and (if the monitor and backlight are good), still read the screen.
But with the technology you're talking about, you'd need an external light source in many situations. What with devices getting more and more portable, how likely is that to become popular?
"And like that
There's no reason it can't incorporate a light source as well, which can be turned off when not needed.
;-)
Yes, these already exist, they're called MONITORS.
"And like that
It's all a function of perspective; a display that emits light in the RGB colorspace or reflects light in the CMYK colorspace can be functionally identical, because in the end they are both measured by the light your eyes absorb. The only advantage that a lighted display has is that it has a much broader dynamic range than a piece of paper; it can get brighter than ambient light.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
I've looked in to OLED technology, and indeed the claims are pretty impressive. But there is a downside, particularly when it comes to power consumption.
OLED's burn power only when on - with white using by far the most juice. Black is almost free.
Therefore - if you run white text on a black background, you get great battery life. Black text on a white background (what we are used to) sucks battery like no tomorrow.
Unless the public will accept a switch to white on black interfaces (or hey, an amber screen works great!), OLED's will have limited application in battery powered devices.
Better luck next time....
... from Kodak.
OK. So you write a little thingy that reduces all color to grayscale and then adjusts it to "amberscale" (or whatever color you feel like).
You can even put it in a cover and put that between your box and the monitor if you like.
Why, if there are more people with your problem, you might even make some money!
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
maybe then my laptop battery will last long enough to finish a DVD.
It really does! I never would have thought that someone would ever would have found, or claimed to have found a suitable replacement for LCDs. Exspecially one that was brighter, thinner, lighter, and faster than liquid crystal displays. Not to mention they take less power to run, offer higher contrast, look equally bright from all angles and have the potential to be much cheaper to manufacture than their conventional counterparts." This is amazing news! I'm sending my VISA information so I can be the first one to have one.
sheesh
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
I read the story about these last year. Why are they posting it again. There's nothing new to say. However I was thinking there might be some coolness if we use these in places besides replacing LCD screens. For example replacing all LEDs with organic ones. Look around you right now and take note of every LED you see. Now replace it with an organic one. Also have you seen those lighting systems that have a bed of LEDs in the basement and then a bunch of fiber optics bringing the light to every room in the house. Thing about the energy savings if every house has a bed of organic LEDs! No more lightbulbs because LEDs don't die.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I frankly prefer an amber LCD display. Amber is scientifically proven to be the easiest color on the eyes. When I'm simply writing code, reading e-mail, or browsing the web I do not see the need for the expense of a color display. Frankly, the only thing color displays are good for at all are video games.
---
Know someone who is stealing cable? Report them!
...but professor...my monitor was sick!!!
How else could the above post be considered 'flamebait' ?
Plenty more humo(u)r like this can be found at Kuro5hin and at Geekizoid and at slashdot itself.
Be warned, you might want to turn off automatic image loading in your browser. I'll say no more.
The well organized but very secretive Troll High Council calls this: "Education through Misinformation."
Organic LED's were developed in Tronto Ontario, More specificly Electrolumenicesnt Polymers and the plastics invloved. That was in Canada over two years ago. Electrolumencent Displays (Used primaraly in the military have made use of this technology extensively.) Only recently has the rest of the knowen tech world caught on. They had trouble develping the techniques for pixels. But It is cheaper in bulk to produce than a typical CRT.
What do they mean by organic displays? Are there going to be microscopic fish living inside of my monitor? Am I going to have to take my laptop to the vet every four months for checkups? Will the fish evolve into futuristic supermonsters and destroy everything I hold dear? And what about the ethical issues of trapping little fish in a panel to serve our bidding? The risks seem too great.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
My stereo uses OEL... Pioneer seems to already use this technology in their car stereos. Look here:
m on/ArticleDetails/0,1484,912,00.html
http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/Pioneer/CDA/Com
isn't this like the 18th LCD replacement story on /. in recent months? where is all this vaporware going anyways
... Meanwhile, the organic viewscreen has grown it's need for energy immensely, pulling energy from all dilithium crystals and now also life support
Scotty: "Captain, we've been trying to revert the power from the deflector shields to the viewscreens, but they need more power, I suggest we feed the power cells of the viewscreens with squished twinkies and donuts to feed their power needs, after all they are organic!"
Kirk: "make it so,, Scotty, and check our license from MicroRomulan for those screens again eh?"
Actually, it's a concept, but they've already crammed a 640x480 display in it. The pixels are so close they claim to be able to reproduce grayscale. Hope it gets more energy-friendly, so we can get X running :)
Linux *is* user friendly. It's not idiot-friendly or fool-friendly!
I would welcome any advance in flat screens. Especially if I can play Quake on it without getting wicked screen tracers. The big question is how much cheaper they can make them. ~700 for a 15" flat screen is sick.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
Thin Film Diamond technology!
If the price is low, I really don't mind a disposible display.
I recently went to a seminar by one of the leaders in this field and he was saying that while OLED's have the potential to be really great at some point in the future, they don't actually have any idea of how to make these low-powered OLED's that everybody keeps talking about. They are approaching better power efficiencies but basically, although they use less power for the same brightness, most OLED's actually lose most of their produced illuminative power insided the media they are sandwiched between by internal reflectance. Theoretically they have great efficiency compared to modern LED's but practically they have a long way to go.Until they over come these hurdles, OLED's will continue to be the stuff of World's Fairs and the like. Of course, if electricity is no object....
Things you like to hear from geeks: Thank you You're welcome
Organic merely means the main element is carbon
instead of silicon, plus whatever else you need
to throw in. Since Carbon and Silicon share the same
column in the Periodic Table of the Elements
you'd expect some overlapping chemical and
electrical properties.
Yea, that's great, but when will they be on the market for the average jo to buy one?
Common, I don't belive that nobody here knows the diference betweeen ORGANIC and ALIVE. ORGANIC are all the substances made of carbon (or with carbon on it's composition ). Your pencil is organic (all of it, not just the wood). ALIVE are organic substances that perform the life cicle: born, grow, reproduce and die. Please, don't make me stop visiting slashdot becouse of this kind of post...
Ladies and gentlemants, Elvis has left the buildnig...
You've got smarts...but boogers will never be the answer....I mean honestly, who wants to see a wall of boogers?
-Tar Ciryatan, Angry Hermit-
Good god, they're trekkies. Those poor, poor souls.
-Tar Ciryatan, Angry Hermit-
Which organic compound is used in these new OLED?
-Phil
The key: "It's not what you Know, it's who you know"
Which organic compound is used in these new OLED?
-Phil
The key: "It's not what you Know, it's who you know"
Actually, having done my undergraduate engineering thesis on this, and hoping to do my master's thesis on it, I think I'm informed enough to comment. Screen printing: actually, Epson has teamed up with Seiko and licensed the cambridge display technology. I assume that the cambridge display technology is based on the early cambridge breakthroughs, many of which involved the 'baking' of a spin-cast liquid precursor to form the desired polymer (in the early days before copolymers were used, it was polyparaphenylenevinylene or PPV). Anyways, the point is that you could conceivably 'paint on' the thin films you need to produce an OLED, and Epson was recruited to utilize their inkjet printing expertise on a manufacturing level. So yes, eventually we would like to screen print OLEDs as it would be the easiest way to produce very large area displays. speed to market: well, one telling graph uses this analogy. The common lightbulb is the minimum level of brightness we require for a viable light source. It has taken inorganic LED's almost 30 years to reach that level (and has leaped past it in the last ten or so), but since research has exploded on OLEDs, they have reached those intensity levels in approximately eight years. if this trend continues (and it will, because long-lasting OLEDs are right now the holy grail of the display technology world) I dont see why the engineering obstacles won't be overcome, by sheer effort if nothing else. the ultimate display: yes, a book-like display would be nice, and work is being done on static writing pads utilizing TiO2 (because it is nice and white, basically). The concept involves charging or uncharging TiO2 particles so that they stick to a transparent substrate. It's essentially etch-a-sketch. But the thing is, the ultimate display SHOULD have a light source, because we pesky humans have disregarded the night for a long time now. You could theoretically add a reflective layer to a display (a layer mirrored facing the display then microangled to bounce light off another reflective surface and to your eyes), especially with the advances in nano-reflective layers used in today's semiconductor lasers, but it would just add another layer of complexity and manufacturing costs for the sake of "niceness". It's not like monitors are totally unbearable. wow, a pretty long posting for my first slashdot reply. hopefully it wasnt too full of crap.