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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 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...
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.
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.
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.
Dug around, found a site which has pictures of the process.
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.