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Chi Mei Announces 20" Active Matrix OLED Display
deglr6328 writes "The final barriers to OLED commercialization have been falling fast lately with Kodak's first product shipping soon, Samsung demoing a 256 color OLED wristwatch phone and now Chi Mei Optoelectronics announcing a 20 inch full color active matrix OLED display. The new display was made possible by a breakthrough using amorphous silicon for the TFT. The new technique is said to allow conventional TFT LCD manufacturers to convert their facilities over to OLED with relative ease."
If it's organic, would it decay in time?
Hope we don't have to water them to make sure your screen doesn't turn yellow over time...
Kidneys as forms of payment? :-/
Seriously how long before this technology becomes affordable?
...the problem with the blue LED fading over a few years of use? That would be a showstopper for me, unless these units are so cheap that I can buy a new one every 6-12 months without feeling the pain.
Will this mean cheaper displays for the consumer or are they going to be sky high like LCDs were for a few years?
Unless they are much greater than LCDs in some respect, I don't know why the regular Joe Bloggs would want to upgrade from a CRT.
what kind of electromagnetic emissions do these things put out? Supposedly the previous generation of LCDs were meant to be low-emissional, but I've noticed by carefully looking at the specs that many of them fail standards which CRTs typically pass.
Imagine a cinema screen done with OLED, no need for digital projection, it's be a digital screen.
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
Or, it's ch-ch-ch-CHIA!
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
>>That is pretty pathetic!
The new Dell laptops can do 1600x1200!
what's the point of 1600x1200 on a 15 inch screen? Your only going to run it at 800x600 unless you want to be straining your eyes all the time. at most someone might run it at 1024x768.
I ran my 17 inch monitor at 1024 like most people. Now I have a 21 and run it at 1600x1200, i'm thinking of lowering it because it's almost to small.
From the announcement, it seems like this 20" display can only do 1280x768. I'm sorry, but at 20", it better be able to do better than that. If it won't do at least 1600x1200 (or I guess 1600x960, with that aspect ratio), I'm not interested. My 19" CRT comfortably does 1600x1200, so any LCD or OLED display would have to do at least that for me to consider upgrading.
5000 employees - pretty big.
The new technique is said to allow conventional TFT LCD manufacturers to convert their facilities over to OLED with relative ease
The real question is, will this mean affordable big screens?
I saw a flatscreen LCD monitor in CompUSA the other day going for $2000. Sure it looked great, but $2000 is wacko. $200 maybe, but not $2000.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
'World's largest 20" OLED full color display'
I'm I the only one that thinks 'world's smallest 20" display' would be more impressive"
Yes, the early ones will be expensive. But, the whole point of this technology is that it is cheaper than LCD. Once the initial R&D has been paid for, they will be cheap. Plus, take a look at those specs. 300 Cd/m^2 at 25W. The Apple 20" Cinema Display only has 230 Cd/m^2, and it uses over twice as much power, 60W! These are a big deal because they use even less energy than an LCD, and they'll be easier to manufacture. (LCD's are actually easier to manufacture than CRTs, but economies of scale kick in, that's why CRTs are so much cheaper. Plus LCDs are prone to pixel failure, which OLED displays supposedly aren't.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I can't imagine ever running at 800x600 again. My 15" TFT runs at 1024x768 because it doesn't allow me to run in a higher resolution. My 17" CRT on the other hand is running at 1280x1024. I just like to have lots of different windows opened at the same time
/(bb|[^b]{2})/
Most people I know run their 17" monitors at 1280x1024, not 1024x768. 1024x768 is fine for a 15" monitor, but it's too damn big on anything larger. On 19" or up (assuming a good 19", anyway), 1600x1200 is the way to go.
If you have eyesight problems, you may want to mention that. Yes, 1600x1200 seems small when you first start using it, but it grows on you. Give it time, and so long as you don't have sight issues (mild glasses or contacts don't count), you'll soon love the extra screen real estate. My laptop can only do 1280x1024 (couldn't justify the extra cost for a UXGA screen), and it's pretty annoying to go from my desktop 19" or 21" CRTs at 1600x1200 to the 16" LCD at 1280x1024. My roommate has a Toshiba laptop with a 15" UXGA screen, and it's surprisingly useable at 1600x1200. 1280x1024 is good enough for a second monitor on a dual-head machine, but not for normal work.
But does the intensity of the colours fade with time? And further, does each intensity decay at a different rate?
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
"World's largest frame for monitor" seems more appropriate! Jesus, there's like a foot of plastic around that thing! Kind of defeats the space saving purpose of LCDs if you have to take everything off of one side of the room just to fit the bitch in sideways!
Ok, so I got a bit carried away in my previous message :) But...
:)
;^) >> :D
<ramble>
If you buy a laptop now, most of them are set at the maximum resolution: 1024x768, regardless of whether they have a 12", 14" or 15" LCD screen.
Only a few offer higher resolutions. Whether or not that's a good thing on a 15" screen is another matter altogether.
Not too long ago I was using a CGA screen, which had 320x240 in 4 Colours! I thought that was pretty amazing...look how far we've come since then...see if you can find a recently made program that will run in that resolution.
640x480 is still feasible though...but it's getting less.
Now Think ahead. Think 5 years ahead.
The programs, GUIs and interfaces that we use are becoming more graphically demanding, they require better graphics cards, and will probably require higher resolutions.
Obviously there will be steps in the development of the resolution that these OLED displays are capable of, BUT if you are going to present a new type of display, why not produce a demo/prototype that has a resolution that beats anything currently available on the market? Would create a low more interest than just the 'new technology' angle IMHO
And think about this: If you are going to make screens BIGGER, the resolution will have to go up as well. Dramatically. Ever looked at those new-fangled plasma displays? Huge screens + low resolution = pretty awfull and WAY too expensive.
As for myself:
I use a 17" CRT screen, it's set to (approx) 1400x1200 in X-windows and 1280x1024 in Windoze. I don't think that is too small, I can read the small fonts perfectly (and I do sit some distance away from the screen thankyouverymuch
It's nice to surf the web and be able to see an entire webpage (or most of it) on the screen at once.
<<Insert obligatory pr0n joke right here
I can also see more of my code at once. This is a Good Thing(tm)
I get annoyed when I have to use a machine that's set to a lower resolution.
I must admit though that when other (mostly older) people use my machine they complain about the small fonts.
</ramble>
It's too bad that the monoitor has such a gigantic bezel. (And by "bezel", I mean the frame around the monitor) It's ugly, and it make placing multiple monitors side by side less useful.
In fact, this is sort of a generic question: Why do current LCDs have a bezel, and can OLED technology remove the need for a bezel totally? I thought that the bezel was somehow related to the backlighting, and since OLEDs didn't have backlighting, they could be nearly frameless. But I might have just imagined that. Somebody's got to know.
my vision is fine. Also i like the space of 1600x1200 it's just the matter that for most people it's way to damn small. This is why for windows XP, maybe 2k (i just don't know about it) MS re-adjusted the size of things so people could use a 17" at 1024x786 comfortably, before then it made things to small. Most people i know have 15 or 17 inch monitors, all of them run at 800x600 or 1024x768. I'm sure some people run 17's at higher, but they are very much a minority.
I see it as a good thing in the long run. But, OSes need to be set to double the size of everything within the OS. So that it actually uses the extra pixels to smooth things out, add detail.
I see Apple's OS X as the best option for these kind of insane resolutions, with its built-in Display PostScript (a.k.a. Quartz) handling everything. It should be a simple matter to just say that you want, say, 1" tall icons, no matter what dpi the screen has. Or that your 10 point font should be equal in size to a printer's 10 point font. 'points' are based on old physical typesetting sizes, and are based on a 72dpi base. Dell's monstrous 1920x1200 resolution more than doubles that at 147dpi. Note that the Sony Picturebook, with it's 8.9" 1280x600 display tops that at 159dpi, and their U-series ultra-micro notebooks even go beyond that at a whopping 200dpi! For reference, a 17" CRT (16" viewable) at 1024x768 has a 'measly' 80dpi. (Pumping it to 1280x960 makes it go to 100dpi. And if you run that 'bastard' resolution of 1280x1024 (a 5:4 resolution on a 4:3 screen,) you end up with non-square pixels at 100dpi horitontally, and 107dpi vertically. Note that 1280x1024 LCD screens use square pixels, so they are have a slightly different aspect ratio than most other CRTs and LCDs.)
Note that I have the original PictureBook, which has the same size screen as the current models, only with a slightly lower resolution, which comes in at 127dpi. I find it perfectly readable with WinXP's ClearType. (Yes, I'm torturing a Pentium MMX/266 with 64MB of RAM by installing XP on it...)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
The size doesn't matter to me, the resolution does. This one is only 1280x768. Hell, I run my 17" CRT at 1600x1200. Whats the point in having all that space if you don't make use of it. Show me one running at 1600 or above and I'll consider it.
...Unless it can avoid the prime reason why gamers avoid LCD's.
Pixel refresh times. The very best lcd monitors have a pixel rise time of 12, and a pixel fall time of 4, giving you a disgusting scraping haze effect whenever turning in a 3d game, or scrolling lots of text fast.
If they'd mentioned it's pixel refresh times, I'd have phoned them already, but since they didn't it's probably really pathetic (like regular lcd's)
So in other words, they will be ridiculously expensive.
Perhaps though it will help bring down the price of the conventional LCD screen. Although prices on LCD screens have come down a hell of a lot, they are still very much more expensive then a CRT.
I'd be happy with a 20" normal LCD screen for under $550.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
18 months ago, reports were that it would take 18 months for these to come out of the labs.
Nice to see some industries aren't sitting around...now if we could only get Bluetooth, GSM, 802.g and fuel cells up to speed...
Can be found here
I've heard that OLED will solve the refresh rate problems that LCDs have had, so that they'll truly be able to replace CRTs once the prices come down and such. Is this true? The only thing holding me back from buying a new monitor is the fact that I want to game and work on the same unit -- I want the viewable space, smaller form factor and lightweight properties all rolled into one. Is OLED the solution that will bring this all to pass?
You don't havn't seen the 15" Dell screen have you. I don't have any problem with eye strain like I do on my CRT at 1600x1200. The LCD has such a great distinction between pixels that you get an incredibly sharp image compared to a CRT at that res. Also you can use slightly larger fonts and still get much of the benefit of that resolution. I was so impressed at finally being able to stomach 1600x1200 on my dell laptop that I went and bought an LCD for my desktop.
Well, you say that because you don't understand (like most people) that greater resolution _improves_ readability, if you know how to configure things correctly.
Also, running an LCD on a it's non-native resolution (800x600) is a great way to turn a $2000 monitor into something that looks worse than a $100 vga crt they sold about 10 years ago.
This is thanks to that blurry scaling they use these days. Kind of like buying a corvette and never taking it out of first gear.
If you're proud of that, you go guy!
#6495ED - cornflower blue
They'll do like nvidia did in the video card market. The prices for the current high end will stay the same and the new tech will be even higher.
1280x768 is plenty higher than a domestic TV, and people pay a fortune for plasma versions of them.
"World's largest 20" OLED full color display, WXGA (1280x768) with Low power consumption driven by Amorphous Silicon TFTs."
The world's largest 20" display? Is it that much bigger than other 20" displays? Or does it just have a tremendously large frame?
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
The point is that scalable fonts finally end up looking halfway decent. Displaying scalable fonts on a 75dpi or 100dpi screen, with hinting and everything else, is at best a mediocre compromise.
800 x 600 goes into 1600 x 1200 evenly. each virtual 800x600 pixel will take up 4 physical pixels on the 1600x1200 screen, with no scaling artifacts.
-the more you know-
Who said I live in America...and who said 'get GSM out of the lab"?....you've got a (pro-DSM hot-button) chip on your shoulder (hat's too tight, no raisins in your Raisin Bran, whatever) and your flame has nothing to do with anything I said in my comment...sorry for your stress...wish I could help, really.
:)
Oh, wait...actually...I don't care if your head falls off and lands in the toilet
If you have eyesight problems, you may want to mention that.
I'm sitting here on a notebook, 12.1" screen and 1024x768 resolution. At home, I have a (good) 19" CRT running at 1280x1024. Why? Because many programs never learned to scale properly. Fixed-font types become way too small when I turn it up to 1600x1200, and even the supposedly "standard resize" messes up boxes and menus sometimes due to sloppy programming. Now give me a desktop that looks *exactly* like my current one, only in a higher resolution and I'll take it. I got the monitor for it...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
CDT work with novel polymer displays which, particularly in the blue, have stability problems.
This display is made from small organic molecules - a more mature field and is unlikely to suffer degradation effects any worse than say, a plasma display.
Having a UXGA screen and loving it.
In fact, Dell used to put out 14.1 inch screens with UXGA resoltion but seem to have stopped that practice (gf got one, loving it too)...
seriously thinking about plucking down the bux for a d800 (WUXGA at 1920x1200 and centrino-battery-life).
sigh... why can't apple make screens like that on their powerbooks? Am I the only person out there who would pay for a powerbook with that kind of screen, even if it was twice the price of the said dell?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
You realise that you can change the dpi setting of your display, don't you?
My Windows box runs at 1280x960 with 120 dpi fonts. This makes the fonts much easier on the eyes (I'm a bit anal about typography) and lets you fit many more icons and toolbars onto the screen.
It does cause problem with a few poorly tested programs who don't lay out their controls in a resolution independent way, but I've found most such programs lacking in other ways as well.
I have a brand new dell laptop. I run it at 1600*1200. It is very crisp and clear, so good for reading slashdot, checking email, and chatting with people all visible at the same time :)
Of course it does, whatever the girl says to you...size ALWAYS matters!
Now with flat panel monitors, a 20" screen doesn't take much more desk space than a smaller one, and you can lift one without assistance. That is driving the sales, and they can get cheaper, but I think this is a significant point in the price curve for TFT LCD's of this size-- it could be a flattening out point.
So anyone care to wager when 20" OLED screens hit $2K? I'll guess mid 2006, but I bet Apple will have them all over their notebooks much sooner.
If your 14" flat panel cost $150 last year and has an analog interface, sure the picture looks like garbage.
Most people I know run their 17" CRTs at 1024x768, which is about as hi-res as you can get and still read the non-scaling bits.
Most people I know also run their 15" CRTs at 1024x768, because lower resolutions just don't give you enough screen for today's programs.
With a laptop you're usually closer to the screen anyway.
I get your point, but I really think it's more ergonomical to go 1024x768 on a 17" CRT and keep your head a little further from the glass.
This Like That - fun with words!
Probably not a serious problem. If you look at the dupont site http://www.dupont.com/displays/oled/ these appear to be "Polymer OLEDs" or LEDs made with basically a type of plastic. So think organic (carbon based) as in the plastic that makes your keyboard instead of organic as in a banana peel.
I just find that funny.
(Yes, I'm torturing a Pentium MMX/266 with 64MB of RAM by installing XP on it...)
Looks like you're torturing yourself waiting for that slow machine to run XP!---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Hmmm, I remember DVD techonology being touted as "cheaper to produce yet better then VHS". Is this why I'm paying $20-$50 for something which probably cost the manufacturer $1 to make?
How do we know that they won't just jack up the prices of OLEDs to just under LCDs and pocket the profit?
speed ball !
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
I see Apple's OS X as the best option for these kind of insane resolutions, with its built-in Display PostScript (a.k.a. Quartz) handling everything.
FWIW, Quartz is a PDF engine. Display PostScript is a remnant from the days of Rhapsody.
But more relevantly, MacOS X makes essentially no effort to ever scale display resolution to actual monitor resolution in dpi. I think this is a major failing. I think MacOS X basically assumes my monitor is displaying 72 dpi, even though my CRT is closer to (and would be much easier to read if it used) ~105 dpi.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
A lot of the discussion is a rehash of whether OLED's have advantages in power consumption, response time, viewing angle, and color compared to LCD's (the answer is yes). What no one seems to have noticed is that the point of the announcement is that this display was built using amorphous silicon TFT's. This is the same technology used for active matrix LCDS. This means that display companies that want to convert some of their LCD production capacity to OLEDs can do so without necessarily the $500,000,000-$1,000,000,000 it takes to put up a polysilicon fab (like Kodak/Sanyo are doing). So, this means more OLEDs, sooner, for the masses.
You see, I consider it more a torture of the innocent notebook. It's actually pretty snappy. (I have all the eye candy, except ClearType, turned off.) I find that aside from startup time, it's at least as fast as Win98 (which it came with,) and seems faster than Win98 regularly.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Leave it to a firm named "Chi Mei" to give you something big that's fun to look at. Those of you who are familiar with Hong Kong starlet Amy Yip Chi-Mei know that she, too, possess some big things that are fun to look at!
GMD
watch this
and it's pretty annoying to go from my desktop 19" or 21" CRTs at 1600x1200 to the 16" LCD at 1280x1024
I know what you mean. At work I get to use a beautiful 19" mitsubishi at 1600x1200, at a really pleseant refresh. It's so painful to go home and use my 5-year-old monitor that can barely handle 1024x768. The refresh is bad enough that I use 800x600 except for games...
I'd buy a new monitor, but all my money's going into paying for school next summer. :)
Kevin
what's the point of 1600x1200 on a 15 inch screen?
I've got one of these, and I'll tell you what the point is. With 133 dpi resolution, coupled with ClearType, on-screen text looks almost like looking at a printed page. It's effing gorgeous. No jaggies, no individual pixels - just seamless, smooth text. I'll never be happy with a mere XGA or 1280x1024 display again.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Having a look at the screenshot of the 20" display in the article, I could be wrong, but it looks like the image chosen doesn't have alot of blues in it. The sort of image that if the blue capability of the screen was poor you wouldn't notice the shortcoming.
Course it's a first attempt, so lets not be too harsh.
No, you increase the size of everything to compensate for tiny pixels. In Windows, set Display Properties > Scheme to "Windows Classic (extra large)", then configure each app to use larger fonts, or use Ctrl + mouse-wheel to zoom in Mozilla and some M$ apps.
So you get super-crisp text that isn't tiny, and you actually take advantage of your graphics card's support for huge resolutions.
You're still left with stupid apps that won't zoom (e.g. pixel sizing in MSIE) and tiny GIF images.
Unfortunately so many people leave their monitors at the original default resolution that people who use huge resolution are treated like fringe cases and ignored by stupid app developers.
Your graphics card can do huge resolutions, use them and bitch to the app developers that force pixel layout!
=S
but are they non-GMO???
This space available.
(is aspect ratio the right term?)
Seems like if you're going to get close to the widescreen ratio, why not go all the way to 16:9 (they talk about WXGA at 1280:768, I've not heard that "standard" before). Maybe they are having problems producing a large enough screen.
(Maybe I'm just pissed that the OLED startup stock I bought has gone nowhere but down.)
is desk real estate. Flat panel oled is gonna be great, (I hope).
I've never been able to find a decent desk or table that would take my 20" crt and my keyboard, and still give me space to work comfortably.
With an OLED monitor, I could potentially hang it on the wall behind the desk. Worst case, it could sit at the back of the desk and I wouldn't have to lean back to avoid trashing my eyes like I do now.
Sure, I could by a flat panel now. But all the ones I've seen are 15" and still cost way too much. The OLED displays are supposed to be far cheaper to produce, and this one is 20".
Visual developers need high resolution monitors.
Most Java IDEs and Lotus Notes needs 1024x768 just to have all the panels readable. MS Visual Interdev is much worse; most developers start with 1280x1024, but quickly switch to 1600x1200.
The IDEs need room for a:
- object browser,
- visual layout, and a
- code editor.
Other possibilities include a
- project browser, and
- quick reference.
I write Java using Notepad or vi, but I still wish for more vertical space so I can read many lines of code at once. I wish my monitors had the ability to turn sideways. They can do 1920x1440. 1440x1920 would be better for programming. But 60lb 21" monitors are not easily to position on their side.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
The real question is what kind of OLEDs are being used? The article says that IBM is somehow involved, but they don't own any of the OLED patents. The companies with the primary keys to the kingdom are Kodak, who control the small-molecule OLED formulations, Universal DIsplay Corporation, who has phosphorescent OLED patents, and Cambridge Display Technology, who has the Polymer OLED IP, and Opsys, who is workign on dendrimer tech to increase OLED lifetimes.
This not only affects who gets the money, it also is an indicator of color gamut and processing technology. Each formulation has pros and cons with respect to operating lifetime, how the material can be deposited on the substrate, and color saturation.
The OLED industry currently has an agreement that any company can create prototype displays using anyone's chemistries, as long as they don't try to sell it. That's why Sony was able to use Kodak's small-molecule materials in the prototype OLED display they have been showing around.
In other words, the device is the first step. The negotiations come after.
Well, it's big enough to get 720P (1280x720, progressive) HDTV on there and still have room for subtitles/controls, etc. at the bottom of the screen.
... by the Dew of Mountains the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning
most people?
just because you run it at a resolution XYZ, that doesn't mean "most people" run it at that.
90% of the designers I know run at 1600x1200, and even more programmers I know run at that.
I run my laptop at 1400xsomething - and I would run higher if the screen could do it.
Just because you have bad eyes and therefore can't comprehend that there is a real need/desire for more real estate doesn't mean that you can just shrug off other users.
I don't assume that everyone runs at 1600x1200 or higher - but you assume that anyone that runs higher than you will strain their eyes...
I suppose there isn't much use in me writing this since it looks like a bunch of other people replied to this and also mentioned you were a dipshit.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Sun's NeWS network extensible windowing system was a Postscript-based window system in ~1987 that was much more flexible than X about what objects lived where, and what you saw on the screen really was what you got on paper. OK, it was written in Postscript, debugging was marginal at best, crashing was ugly and undebuggable, and security was non-existent (:-), but Gosling who wrote it was able to carry over many of the lessons to Java.
Display Postscript, which the NeXT folks picked up, wasn't quite as powerful, but most programmers who used the stuff raved about it, and being Postscript-based it looked really nice. How much of that is still there in OSX?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks