Slashdot Mirror
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."
for a camera with 3.1megapixel and a screen that doesn't need back lighting. Now if only manufacturers would rate the battery life based on how many pictures it can take with one charge, that would help consumers.
And of course, the info is on their website. Including ``Not currently available in the U.S.''
It's really the OLED display thats innovative. (As you might hae gathered from the slashdot article title.)
On typical cameras and monitors, any color LCD display will require a big bright power-hungry light source running behind the LCD to make it glow.
But not in this camera, the Organic LED (read light EMITTING diode) actually glow ! There is no need for a big power hungry light source, since the individual pixels generate light.
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.
This may be the first Kodak product that uses their own OLED technology, but does anyone remember the article (I think it was from CNET) which contained a quote by a Kodak executive saying they were already shipping 8-inch OLED displays in quantities to a "manufacturer" who they couldn't disclose? A very high resolution screen that would be used in a product that they didn't know much about but that would be a revolutionary one and be released in the first half of 2003?
Somehow, the article has vanished. Even from Google.
The truth is out there and yes, I want to believe.
This is great. A consumer device with an OLED display. One of many technologies to counter our lack of significant innovation in batteries. I think that one of the best places for an OLED display is a pda. I hope one is out by the time that my NR-70's batteries die. Neither Handspring or Sony sell replacement batteries, which means that the PDA is a throw-away item, even if I can take out the battery by my self...
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Yeah, cept Kodak is the leading developer of OLEDs and owns almost all the patents on them. :)
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 = Karma Whore. All you've done is regurgitate the highlights of every major news article on OLEDs."
;)
Yeah, but until there's a +1 Regurgitation score, +1 Informative will have to do.
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)
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.
Yes, and it'll probably be just a coincidence that these problems are solved right about the same time that the major players' huge investments in the old LCD manufacturing tech begins to break even. :-)
--
Power to the Peaceful
Jeeze I remember when I was reading about this almost over three years ago! I'm glad to see that they are finally coming into the retail market. I'll be really excited when the flexible OLED screens become a retail product.
The light source part is correct, but the "power-hungry" part isn't true. Current backlighting is performed with either White LED's, electrolum, or flourescent tubes, with the flourescent tubes actually being a bit less power-hungry, but, obviously, a little more fragile. The only efficiency is gained by directly viewing the light source (the Light-Emitting-Diode (LED) part of OLED) instead of indirect light via reflection by the current backlighting methods. The big gain is in the Organic (O of OLED) part of the process, which in this case refers to organic plastics (ie, cheap plastics). Great technology, and I'm glad their finally shipping mainstream products, but the parent article and one of the linked articles imply great power savings, which isn't so. Slight efficiency gains, but not leap forward technology in power savings.
Religion and science are both 90% crap..but that doesn't negate the other 10%.
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.
Well, Thank God.
It really pisses me off when they put all those chemicals and pesticides in my LEDs.
"...you can steal my woman, but you ain't done nuthin' smart."