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Kodak Releases Digital Camera With OLED Display
arth33 writes "Kodak has announced the LS633 Digital camera with OLED display. The camera and imaging specs are pretty standard (3.1 MegaPixels, 3x Optical Zoom, etc) but the viewfinder screen is a 2.2" OLED screen with a resolution of 512 x 218 pixels. According to the press release at DPreview, 'This large, full color, full motion, flat panel display is sharp, bright and features 165 viewing angles for on-camera viewing and sharing. Packaged in a stylish, metal body, the LS633 is perfect for users who want to show off their pictures on a cutting-edge OLED display.' All this and it's pretty cheap at US$399, and is expected on shelves in April in Australia, Europe and Asia.
More pics and information is also available at LetsGoDigital."
It stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode.
More info here.
Not organic as in biological tissues, but rather organic chemistry. Hydrocarbons et al.
And of course, the info is on their website. Including ``Not currently available in the U.S.''
LetsGoDigital is going to fry any time now. Mirror available here.
Please use, I'm measuring the Slashdot effect. (Seriously! There's no such thing as a karma whoring AC.)
OLEDs are Organic LEDs. Basically, OLED technology is like LCD (in its application, the two are about as different as can be technically) except once the technology matures, OLEDs are cheaper, easier to manufacture and don't require a backlight (as like normal LEDs, they produce their own light.) It's not really any brighter (well it may be, but that's not its main advantage.) Basically, they're like LCDs except without all the drawbacks like viewing angle, price and physical sensitivity. Unfortunately, it'll be a few years before this technology gets into computer displays. The current life expectancy of them leaves a bit to be desired, but eventually this will be solved.
Phil Askey, who runs www.dpreview.com has performed this test with many cameras, such as the Canon Powershot G3 (table at bottom of the page).
I don't know if he'll review the Kodak camera or not, but DPReview is a good site for practical information like that.
0x0D 0x0A
Look at this review of the Canon G3 on dpreview.com. Scroll down to the "Battery Life" section...
This looks like a nice, comprehensive comparison based upon battery life.
Just check around on the site... you never know what is out there until you look..
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Stupid should hurt.
Organic Light Emitting Device/Display
More comparible to TFT diplays than to LEDs.
Cheaper
x10 (or more) faster response times (compared to traditional TFTs)
No need for backlight
Even thinner than TFTs
Can be completely transparent
Can be flexible
see universal display
extract: greater brightness
faster response time for full motion video
fuller viewing angles
lighter weight
greater environmental durability
more power efficiency
broader operating temperature ranges
greater cost-effectiveness
Think how much the industry is making on Plasma screens. Do they have any real incentive to start selling a cheaper alternative?
You can order a development kit, complete with a working OLED screen at this link:
j ht ml
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/display/AM550L.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
The replies you are getting are pretty half-assed, so let me elaborate a little further...
OLED stands for organic light emitting display. Traditional LCD (liquid crystal diode) diplays that are found on laptops use traditional semiconducting materials like polysilicon. The polysilicon is deposited in a thin layer on glass, and transistors are fabricated in this material just like transistors are made on silicon wafers. The tranistors function to send current to small pockets of liquid crystal material above them. These liquid crystals are normally amorphous, like a liquid, but when a current is applied, the molecules in them all line up and block light.
OLEDS use semiconducting polymer instead of silicon.
The display is incredibly vibrant. It's hard to describe in words, but the colors are very saturated, unlike the washed-out look of most LCD's. It almost looks like you're looking at a piece of paper, everything is so crisp, clear, and vibrant. Kudos to Kodak for getting this technology out into the marketplace. Hopefully we'll be seeing more of this in the near future!
This is actually something that Kodak has worked hard on, and they've come a long way. The colors you see in OLEDs are based on organic dyes. The dyes must have good saturation, but also last a long time (i.e. not "photobleach" or fade). One of the best dyes they've found for the blue is a compound called indole (it looks a lot like the purine bases in DNA, oddly--how organic is that?!) that is a very bright blue color, and is extremly stable.
The big problem with these right now, as has been pointed out many times, is that they fade over time. No one really knows the exact reason for this, but oxygen is a big culprit. They are combatting this with diffusion barriers, similar to the oxygen diffusion barriers used on plastic beer bottles, which use cobalt scavengers to trap oxygen.
taken from http://www.cknow.com/ckinfo/acro_o/oled_1.shtml A display device consisting of a series of carbon-based thin films sandwiched between two electrodes; one transparent (often glass). OLED technology holds promise because of the ability to tailor the organic molecules to vary color saturation, sensitivity, and other optical properties.
;)
A new OLED variant, phosphorescent OLED (or PHOLED) has been developed for portable phones. This variation is a low-power variant developed by Universal Display.
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There are people who have explained OLED, etc.
But even with all the explanations on how much better than LCD it is, its hard without at least a picture. Here is that picture. It was taken at the CES trade show.
WARNING: looking at this picture may make you realize how crappy your LCD monitor really is and what you have settled for:
Ta da!
It really shows the drawbacks of LCD's viewing angle and thickness because of backlighting. In the board the picture taker explains he has seen solid colour on this monitor there (demo running i guess) and the picture was perfectly even.
Anyways, thought i'd share! Enjoy.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
This is BS. Almost everything you say is wrong. It wouldn't bother me except for the "The replies you are getting are pretty half-assed..." bit.
LCD (liquid crystal displays) are constructed of a bunch of liquid crystal material sandwiched between glass plates. Liquid crystals are made of molecules that are very long and thin. In the nematic (or twisted nematic) phase, they line up to all point in the same direction (in twisted nematic, used in many LCDs, the orientation changes as you move between the two glass plates, but is locally the same). By making fine scratches in the glass plates, they can be forced to line up in specific directions, such that the rotate the polarization of light going through it by 90 degrees (or more for STN -- super twisted nematic). You then put polarizers on the faces and you have something that blocks light from a flourecent tube. By applying an electric field to the liquid crystal, the molecules rotate such that they don't rotate the polarization, and it now transmits light. Passive matrix LCDs scan one row at a time and rely on the liquid crystal molecules being slow to reorient to preserve them until the next scam, where as active matrix (TFT -- thin film transistor) displays have little transistors that hold a charge on each cell from one scan to the next.
The big problems with LCDs are that they need a backlight to get good contrast and that they throw away a lot of light because the lamp has to be on even when the pixels are black and a lot of light is lost to color filters to make different color pixels on RGB displays. Also, since it works by rotating polarization, it is very angle sensitive, and they are very slow.
OLEDs are an array of LEDs that are made with an organic polymer semiconductor. Like normal LEDs, they emit light when current passes through a diode, the wavelength of the light being dependent on the band gap of the semiconductor. However, it is much easier to make a fine grid of closely spaced pixels with OLEDs than regular LEDs. The solve almost all the problems of LCDs except that they tend to break down if any moisture gets into them, and water is extremely hard to get out and keep out so they tend to have a realatively short shelf-life. I assume that this problem has been mostly solved here, or a bunch of people are going to get cameras whose display will die within a year or two.
Some company did release a PDA that does that. It's called an Apple Newton. When you went to buy an eMate, the salesperson would have you drop it from a few feet onto the store floor. In fact, I have one that survived a three story drop without any cosmetic damage, let alone functional damage. I've even heard of them making it through being hurled at concrete pillars in a parking garage. Apple made sturdy stuff. Of course, with 4 good rubber feet, you wouldn't be able to brush it off your desk unless it was on top of some paper.
Heh, embarassed. I read the article, without reading the entire summary - I guess the /. submitter must have found out it was in US dollars. My bad. Mod me down, please.
An XGA size display seems much more useful. Press release from Toshiba Matsushita Display. ...though may not be so useful in a digital camera!
The other item about these displays is that they put off little to no heat and are thinner due to the lack of little lights needing to be placed behind the glass panel.
There is rumor that Apple has been developing an OLED with with it's partner Samsung for about a year now. Two of their manufacturing partners are suppliers to Kodak.
I would link, but it's hard to give links to Digitimes and Japanese articles.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny