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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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
You can find out more about OLED from the company working on it, Universal Display Corporation
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
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?
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.""
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.
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.
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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 :)
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Dyolf Knip
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
Personally, I only use free-range LED displays, and only ones that I personally pick out of the herd.
Refresh rates and certainly brightness are real issues here - I agree. But one thing I'd like to see is what is under my soon-to-be (shurley) recovered deskspace when the behemoths are moved out for the new flat panel...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
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.
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.
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Know someone who is stealing cable? Report them!
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
... 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!