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."

Comments

I wonder if they've solved...

[tuxlove]

...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.

curiously,

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:if it's organic....

[Paul Johnson]

Good question. Reading between the lines of the Cambridge Display Technology web site, it seems that colour purity and stability have been the big stumbling blocks so far. CDT have demoed small displays in the past, but I don't know how stable they were.

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.

Resolution?

[Osty]

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.

Re:Ahahaha...first post :P

[Osty]

I ran my 17 inch monitor at 1024 like most people.

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.

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. ... Now I have a 21 and run it at 1600x1200, i'm thinking of lowering it because it's almost to small.

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.

Lookit that gigantic bezel

[IvyMike]

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.

Re:Lookit that gigantic bezel

[MrMickS]

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.

On the larger screens here are three possible reasons:

1. Rigidity. By placing the screen into a large plastic frame the LCD doesn't form part of the physical structure of the display. So if you move it you aren't placing any stress on the TFT matrix.
2. Damage resistance. Say you've just bought a nice big 23" LCD display with a thin frame around it. You position it on your desk and and a sitting admiring it whilst consuming your favorite beverage. The door opens, you turn forgetting the beaker in your hand and hit it against the edge of the display. Crack it's gone. If only you'd had a larger frame around the display.
3. Apple started putting large displays around their LCD displays. Everyone else just had to copy :)

It is interesting considering the lack of a frame around the display on my Ti PowerBook.

Re:Ahahaha...first post :P

[Anonymous Freak]

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...)