Slashdot Mirror
Organic Screens, Coming Soon
InfiniteWaitState writes: "Lighter weight laptops may soon be more affordable and have better displays ... Forget LCD, according to this article in The Economist, soon OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diodes) will be in mass production." These organic screens keep getting promised, but this article says that at least 30 companies now have plans to produce them, and that Sony has some biggish plans for TVs as well as computer screens, as well as a 13" demo model to show off.
The Society for Information Display is holding their conference in San Jose next week, the largest display technology conference ever in North America.
As well as floor exhibits from various vendors, there will be a section dedicated to showing off the latest in display technologies (actually working).
I think tuesday and wednesday the floor is open to the public ($10 at the door, maybe). check out the website for more info: http://www.sid.org
Lately the trend is to use the prefix "Bio-" if referring to compounds from living cells, and leave organic to just mean hydrocarbons. For example, the soy-based fuel is "Biodiesel" while "Organic diesel" would be just redundant.
Sometimes means also hydrogen and/or oxygen.
The difficulty of LCD is that you have a transparent substrate, a charge grid below the crystal, a layer of liquid crystal, a ground grid above the crystal and a color grid that changes the white-light display to RGB. Oh, and the glass plates (substrate?) that sandwitch all of this, and the diffuser and backlight. But the big deal is that the glass has to be extremely flat and parallel, and the grids have to all line up, and there can be no closed cells in any of the grids. Fail any one of these and the screen has a dead region (anything visible is death).
Contrast OLED -- light is provided by the element, so the back panel can be opaque (read: not as fragile). The color is in the element too, so one layer of alignment goes. Finally, with proper design the back electrode can provide ground as well, eliminating another alignment headache, and allowing some play (as long as both + and - make it into the pixel, it lights up, and since there's no grid on top you see it whether it's spot-on or not).
So reduction in precision (or better performance for equal precision) and the fact that everything can be layered on a single glass sheet (rather than 2 which must be aligned and mounted parallel) makes the error rate potentially lower, as soon as the new equipment reaches the same level of debugg-ed-ness as the LCD equipment.
Of course, there's still the problem of dye fading and aligning 2 or 3 layers, and that we now want to have larger sheets for larger displays, and that we want to go to plastic to make more durable displays, but hey, researchers gotta eat...
Jesus fucking Christ man are you completely daft? Organic Light Emitting Diode. Hmm I wonder what in the world THAT PHRASE COULD POSSIBLY FUCKING MEAN? Maybe it is a diode made out of organic material (carbon containing, don't be a jackass and construe organic as living tissue). Well yeah I think that's it. Think of a more resolution versions of those traveling LED signs you see at airports or used as stock tickers. OLED displays are basically the same as those except they have three LEDs per pixel and alot more pixels per inch. This means no backlighting for these displays.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Alright well OLEDs consume very little power. Normal LEDs consume very little power even for increadibly bright ones. An entire OLED display (lets say 1024x768 pixels) would consume about a quarter of the wattage as a backlit LCD display of the same size. OLEDs can operate on a very low voltage and have natural capatance which the LCD polarizing switches in LCD displays don't have. And since you're combining several display elements into a single electrical component (a single OLED colour element of a pixel) you've just saved 75% of your production cost not to mention the fact OLEDs can be deposited on the glass (or plastic) surface very easily means they're going to be even cheaper. I don't doubt we'll see 120+ DPI OLED displays in the next two or three years. IBM's 200 DPI LCD screens they made for LLNL will be given a serious technological run for their money. It isn't too much to hope to see OLED displays with print quality resolutions within five years.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Have you seen eXistenZ? You need one of those adaptors.
So could you tell us, oh forcasty one, what companies will be driving this OLED revolution?
-AP
Have they solved the problems with blue OLEDs having a much reduced life expectancy. Last numbers I heard were on the orders of 1000-2000 hours use before fading to much.
Guess this means I'll have to put on "protection" before my late night "browsing" activities.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The word "organic" means the substance has carbon in it. That's all. I doubt that the panels would have any more of a health hazard than plastic, another organic material. At any rate, OLED color screens won't last ten years with present technology because the blue OLEDs only last 1000-2000 hours before fading. Hopefully that'll change soon. Heck, ten years ago, the only blue LEDs that existed would last for ten minutes before burning out - after being cooled with liquid nitrogen.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
2000 hours is about one man-year of 8-hours/day work.
When the life expectancy is more like 10 years, this will be interesting. Until then, it's a losing proposition unless the displays were extremely cheap. (Like, say, $100 for a 1280x1024, 18" array.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I don't know about reliability of the OLED manufacturing process, but the TFT LCD cost a lot because there are lot of units thaat gets trashed because manufacturing is unreliable.
As always, price always lower when time goes, so 20% more now means lot less later, when the product is more widely used and mature.
Hub
my screen died.
-----
"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
I'm am so sick of carrying my 19" monitor to lan parties, it's so damn heavy and big. Imagine how cool it would be to just carry a tiny headset dispay.
Plus, imagine having 15 guys sitting around a few tables all wearing headset displays, that would just be so cool. It would look like something from out of Star Trek(or pick your favorite sci-fi).
With prototypes already made, and so many companies planning on using this stuff, it looks like we may finally get to see these in action. Hopefully the cost will be as cheap as they imply.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Yeah, I used to have an Atari Lynx. Great in a dark movie theater before the movie starts. Useless in strong sunlight.
From what I've seen though (from people carrying around the new Motorola cell phones) these things are pretty usable even in direct sunlight, partially because when they are off they really absorb light quite well so contrast is very good. I doubt that the OLED's would become reflective when 'lit' so a sunny beach might still be out of the question, but at least they aren't as hard to read as the first LED digital watches.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
Will I have to feed it?
Right on!
I expect to be viewing my wall-hanging, flatscreen, OLED digital HDTV with that low-cost, too-cheap-to-be-metered, last mile broadband feed to my home Soon®!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
It should be immediately apparent that this isn't on the order of "the human eye can resolve down to a 120/th of a degree at the center of focus" limit on resolution, since, AFAIK, back row at IMAX beats that limit. Resolution is simply (hah) a matter of getting your pixels small enough, or whatever. But you can't solve the negative light problem; how do you emit darkness?
Sure, it's nice to be getting closer to that color space, but don't get too excited; we're a long way yet from either a pigment and light hybrid, or an new color emulation system. Probably direct nervous stimulation would be easier. (More secure too: let's hope it's harder to Van Eck your eyeballs than a monitor.)
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
One of the other benifits to organic circuitry of any kind (OLEDs included) is that they can be applied chemically, i.e. without heat. Upshot of that is that the substrate doesn't have to be glass. Say goodbye to the single most fragile part of any portable device, down to your HP RPN calculator. And since heat resistance isn't a factor, the substrate could be made flexible, and roll up, for instance. Now the screen can be much larger than the input devices. OLED has so many applications, if they can just their act together, it's staggering.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
Finally it looks like we might be getting there, seeing as people are actually trying to use them in devices rather than just hypothesising. But I think their imagination is still a bit limited since the potential for these is huge - fancy a HUD in your sunglasses, or a spherical TV screen? OLEDs make this substantially easier to achieve. So c'mon already; I wanna buy!
Now, let's see, a, i, u, e, o, ka, ki, ku, etc.
However, if you're wanting something that changes colour but isn't illuminated you're going to have to look elsewhere I'm afraid - these don't work like LCDs. Hope this clears things up a bit.
> While this article manages to hype a currently non-exsistant product
I believe OLED's are being used in the new Motorola Timeport which is already in stores. Though its monochrome, its still an OLED. For a more technical look at OLED,TOLED, etc.:
Univeral Display Corp.
Check out the Transparent OLEDs!
cheers,
metric
One of the physics professors here at Ohio State has been working on the OLED's for years. Now his reasearch is moving to organic magnets. Yes, I mean carbon based magnets!! And you can do some REALLY funky things with them too(like change magnetic properties by shining lasers on them). Check out http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~ppl/ to see some of his reasearch.
If I understand correctly, full-color pixels are possible with OLEDs rather than 3 separate RGB pixels. Would this make Microsoft's eBook ClearType patent irrelevant?
Exactly: carbon-based molecules
Some organic polymers exhibit semi-conducting properties. Simple OLEDs are manufactured by sandwiching an appropriate polymer layer between two (transparant) electrodes.
"One of the world's major manufacturers of LCDs, Toshiba announced on Wednesday its first prototype of a polymer OLED display that supports 260,000 colors. The 2.85-inch display is targeted for production in portable devices, such as cell phones and handheld computers, in April 2002."
What's a sig?
A passage from Dream Theater - Scenes from a Memory:
I just can't help myself
I'm feeling like I'm going out of my head
Uncanny, Strange Deja Vu
But I don't mind- I hope to find the truth
Now where did I see this before? Oh yes, here and here.
This is the place where you write something that will make you seem like a complete idiot.
Right, I know what it stands for. I even stated later in the post that OLED does not solve the backlit dilemma, because its purpose is to emit light. Sheesh. I even got modded down, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because of the negative follow up comments from people that failed to read my entire post?
I brought up an interesting problem with LCDs that despite all of our technical advances still needs to be solved. I thought readers might take interest. Guess not.
- Backlit consume more power
- Backlit require no external light source
- Backlit has glare issues (try using a laptop on the beach sometime)
- Non-backlit require a light source
- Non-backlit look better in natural light than a backlit screen in optimal conditions
- Non-backlit consume WAY less power (probably the reason that Nintendo Gameboy is as popular as it is today)
Maybe someday it will be possible for a screen to be backlit or non-backlit depending a toggle. Or maybe just a photosensor to make the decision automatically. As it stands, laptops are almost worthless outdoors and Gameboy sucks in the dark.From the article it seems like OLED is for backlight-only type devices (since they emit light) so maybe we'll have to wait for the next train before this problem is solved.
-Justin
As that is true I was wondering what type of video adapter would be nesscary. In otherwords my lcd plugs into my laptop with a "your guess is as good as mine" plug, will these displays be compatible?
Or will you need to drive them in a different way? More power? Less power? etc?
The Lottery:
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
If this article uses the first definition, it think you should have a look at the Philips homepage. There's a piece about their PolyLED (Polymer Light Emitting Diodes) displays.
You can find additional info about OLED here and here. They said: OLED production is currently 20% more expensive than LCD (!). But if a "highly productive" fabrication can ramp up, it will cut the cost.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Using the word organic threw me off...from dictionary.com:
organic (ôr-gnk)
adj.
7. Chemistry. Of or designating carbon compounds.
Whew, what a relief. Confusion with Definition 1: (Of, relating to, or derived from living organisms: organic matter.) gets me thinking that I'd have to water or feed my monitor!
Maybe I can gather about 500 fireflies and create a old Burroghs Green screen terminal...
Does anyone have a link to the actual process?
Dug around, found a site which has pictures of the process.
I won't be really happy until I see an organic screen for a desktop system at say... 19 inches. Than I'll get all hot and bothered and buy one. Until then there's no reason for a gamer to care, it's just cool for laptop users. A 19-21 inch OLED with that awesome resolution they say it has plus less power consumption and friggin weight than my current moniter (big-ass CRT) mmmmmmmm *drools* that would be perfect for a desktop system; that's what I'm waiting for as far as monitors go.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
When transistors and thus portable AM radios arrived, music mixes were carefully tailored to sound good through tiny speakers and narrow bandwidth transmission. Likewise almost all of the images we see on computers today have been tailored to look good on the inferior bandwidth or colorspace of the crt. Thus we have aquired the sloppy habit of throwing out all the information that we cannot currently display and/or using software which does.both film and digital cameras record colors outside the range of the crt
When the audio CD format was developed, it was designed to embrace the human ear (5 - 22,000 Hz) even though very few systems can achieve this range. Perhaps now we will see wide-spread adoption of human-centric images (i.e. Web browsers which can open PhotoCD files into the colorspace of the attached display.) Be it a greyscale WAP (for "What A Phony"), CRT, or FullColor (LED).
I hear there will be a flexible membrane on the front of these monitors (and televisions) where you can dose the organic LCD matrix with a hypodermic needle full of McAfee antiviral compounds.
It will be critical for desktop technicians to carry plenty of clean needles.