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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."
...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.
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.
Polymers tend to degrade with exposure to light, especially UV. In a display UV is not generally a problem but obviously light in general is.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
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.
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
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.
"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
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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.
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They are better than LCDs. Main reasons are (IMO) 1: they use less energy - backlit LC displays have to have a powerful backlight on constantly - even though only a small proportion of this light makes it through the LC layer. OLEDs are only lit when they need to be viewed. Energy consumption is a major concern in most mobile devices. 2: they can be viewed from any angle (up to 360 degrees if they are sandwiched between 2 layers of amorphorous silicon) - something LCDs still haven't got to grips with.
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.
Actually the biggest issue with Digital Movie Screens would be not the screen istelf but the actual resolution (and therefore the bandwidth) required to fill such a screen with a high quality image. You would need a massive transfer rate between your media and the screen. I do not believe this would be feasable with current or near term (2-5 years) technologies.
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.
...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)
CDT have demoed small displays in the past, but I don't know how stable they were.
I talked with someone working with them 2 years ago (at IBM). At that point they only lasted a few days in a darkened labs... but a lot of progress could have been made since then. They had a lot of promise even then though, low power & high-res, though they seem to have abandoned high-res here. Perhaps so they "live" longer? It could just be a yield thing though... (Or they are/were aiming for HDTV?)
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.