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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.
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."
A horde of lightning bugs all grab their asses in terror.
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.
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.
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