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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.
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.
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.
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.
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