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GE Reaches OLED Milestone
swordboy writes "General Electric recently announced the largest and most efficient OLED panel ever created. The 24 inch square panel emits 1200 lumens with a power consumption of about 80 watts - on par with today's incandescent bulbs. This represents the first fruit from the NIST project with ECD Ovonics. The ultimate goal is a cheap, flexible display and lighting technology that can function with an efficiency of 100 lumens per watt. This would make great wallpaper." (And, I hope, a great backlight for laptops.)
This would make great wallpaper."
;-)
I can't wait to play Doom in a real house
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Not a display
News five years ago!
Please explain... does this mean they spray pesticides on regular LEDs?
I think it would make great contact lenses!
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
How does the output of 1200 lumens from 80 watts input compare to a conventional bulb's output? To a fluorescent bulb's output?
Well, there is "no market" or "clamor" for consumer grade 10 gigahertz processors, or terabyte hard disks, but thats not going to stop research into faster processors and larger hard drives. Microsoft might be laughing themselves till they pee and patting themselves on the back for coming up with that "innovation" line, but it does actually happen now and then. And no market for low power LCD displays? Are you insane? With todays laptops you're lucky if you break 2 hours of battery life. A lot of that is powering that backlight behind the display. Cutting the power the display takes will do wonders for battery life. And that there is a market for.
Don't these things use much less power? Especially since you don't need a backlight? These things would certainly fill a rather large niche, and they could actually end up replacing LCDs where power consumption is key. I think.
It fills a great gap, low cost, low power consumption portable displays.
Dunno about you, but a really bright LED display would be much preferable to my dim lcd display on my laptop.
A really bright LED display might be a nice replacement to my burned in plasma tv too! (although i wouldnt call it portable)
The irony is killing me.
means that it is still a long long wait..
The ultimate goal is to create sheets of paper-thin lighting devices that can be applied to surfaces in a similar way to wallpapering. Moving forward, in order to accomplish this and bring the product to market, GE needs to make the device even more efficient - eventually reach 100 lumens per watt - as well as develop a low-cost production system.
Hey, that's my password you are typing
Well, if there were no market and no clamor it would be called basic research. Often people can't figure out the use for things until after they exist. For example, lasers - when lasers were invented nobody had a good idea of what they would be used for. Today, they're ubiquitous. Likewise, regular LEDs. At one point HP was trying to decide whether they should continue research on LEDs. Marketing said "no - you'll never be able to have them compete with little lightbulbs" Bill Hewlett said "Go do it" and made a huge market for HP
However, in this case, the uses are obvious - back lights for LCD screens come to mind immediately. Replacements for basic lightbulbs as well. LEDs are currently produced as little specks. In order to replace a high wattage bulb you have to team a number of them together. This is expensive. This process would turn out SHEETS of light emitting material. Also, efficiency. Current lightbulbs (and the prototype panel) produce about 15 lumens per watt - they expect to push the technology to 100 lumens per watt. This, coupled with longevity and a low cost to manufacture will drive existing lightbulbs and compact flourescents off the market. There are gaps that exist that the technology is filling
...no discernable market and no clamor for such a technology.
Ask any architect or interior decorator about the possibilities of light sources which can be embedded in ceilings and walls.
There's your market, right there.
.: Max Romantschuk
Those screenshots were taken using Windows. At least I've got the balls to use Linux, at work, and at home.
And, I hope, a great backlight for laptops.
Actually, they would make up the main part of the screen assembly. OLEDs show color, as well as producing light (hence there will no longer be a need for a backlight).
That's good that they are winning the efficiency battle, but if "OLEDs begin to fade after 3,000-to-4,000 hours" vs LCDs which "generally have a life expectancy of around 100,000 hours", then we are still very much in the interesting-but-not-quite-useable stage as far as computing is concerned. However, they seem to be fine as light bulb replacements, especially if production costs are low. Note that my figures are from an article from August 2003. Anyone have more recent statistics?
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
No, really. They did.
IF (Right tech + right size + right price point) = (convenience) THEN (ubiquity).
One of the main problems with OLEDs it that they begin to fade after 10,000 hrs or so. Any ideas on how long this panel lasts? The PR piece makes it sound like the only outstanding problems are making it "cheaper" and increasing its output per watt.
Does this remind anyone of Fahrenheit 451 at all? The houses in the book had walls that were actually like TV's. I can imagine an array of LCD panels that are backlit via this type of technology being used as a wall TV. Imagine [insert FPS of your choice] on a small wall, say 15'x10'...
Flourescents easily put out 60 to 90 lumens per watt. Low Pressure Sodium lamps of the sort used for outdoor lighting put out around 180 lumens per watt. So remind me again why NIST is spending our tax dollars developing OLEDs?
-Erik -- --This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--
And this is why we don't have a meta discussion page. Because it's all about the money, really. There's too much of it to allow Slashdot to really be impartial.
But nobody really cares anyway. Herds, the lot of ya.
And I'm posting this AC free, damn the punishment.
The secret to getting modded up is to allways say i've got karma to burn in your sig..
OLEDs die.
I was under the assumption that this was the main reason holding OLED displays back. Now it would seem that the panel described here is only for lighting purposes (white light only, no colors or even pixels for that matter), but presumably it will still die or at least dim after a few thousand hours of use.
I recognize that this is not a major problem with cell phone displays and such, but if you plan on building the lighting of your house with these, you won't be too happy if next year or the year after that you get only 300 lumens instead of the promised 1200.
Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!
The whole idea is that if you see something enough times you may believe it. So M$ just puts those ads there so your eyes have a glimpse every once and a while.
:D
I kind of agree with you, but considering you dont pay for slashdot (well, you obviously dont, and neither do I), get used to seeing ads about all sorts of things like this. They need the revenue from somewhere and who cares if its M$. There is by far enough M$ bashing on this site to make up for it
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
No market? No clamor? Good Lord man, people have been dreaming of inexpensive, high efficiency, nealy infinite lifetime, luminous panels for many, many decades.
In the book that I oft make reference to, Your Engineered House, published in 1964, a book which in many respects advocates older "technologies" as being the most suitable to to the task of supplying housing, he looks forward to a day when luminous panels might be available, as they provide the ultimate engineering solution to indoor lighting ( the light fixture in the center of the room/ceiling being the least desirable means, and yet the most prevelant).
Not to mention the possible application of such, buy using RGB OLEDs, to visual displays. Your laptop, your TV, etc, all cheap, efficient, and nearly indestructable.
And, or course, the advent of the "visual wall display" so often used in Science Fiction stories.
No discernable market or clamor for such a technology? Man, you seriously havn't been paying attention.
KFG
Often, one has to stop and think where we are with technology, and how far we've come. Considering that this seemingly "advanced" bulb is ages away from the prototypes of Edison and Swan and to think where we will be (or where our grandchildren will be), in another 100 years from now, is fascinating.
The semiconductor industry hadthe same liftime problems in its development of Gallium, Germanum and Silicon as substrates. This was found to be a problem of controlling impurities in a precise manner. Oxygen is usually the culprit. Same for Organic Semiconductors (OLED) tech.
Does Linux add up to lower TCO? Ask the Experts.
Sounds to me like they've got it about right.
One of life's lessons: Its always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Another completely offtopic thing...i just clicked on the first link in the parent post, saw that the poster had 5 mod points, then i logged in and now i got 5 mod points!
;-)
:-)]
I'm getting paranoid....(clicking ms ads = free mod points?)
[yeah it's just pure coincidence, thanks for reading this offtopic codeonezero post
.... ... }
int main (void) {
I get upwards of 10 hours on my IBM R40 thinkpad (using the modular bay battery, about 6 hours w/o it)... and that's not even in the most power-efficient mode.
How come people always talk about ads on slashdot, but the subject of blocking ads is almost taboo?
/. ads, but noone's ever followed up with something like "use adblock under firebird/fox" or adshield under MSIE. /. but hey, vote with the wallet, even if it's not yours.
I've seen people whine about
I understand it's effectively stealing from
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Slashdot Meta Discussions. Not really advertised, but most oldtimers know about trolltalk at least.
You are also free to start any form of discussion in your journal.
It's a big solid continuous sheet, not a bunch of little individual elements.
The fact that you don't need a backlight anymore makes it not only more energy efficient, but also a lot thinner.
They are already used in some mobile phones.
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
I wonder how much coal, water and other materials are required to create one clean 80W monitor ;).
I remember seeing an HDR display at siggraph, it was 30 times brighter than any commercially available display technology while producing a black that is 10 times darker. They used an array of bright LEDs behind the monitor.
..the ratio is 60,000:1 from the darkest to the lightest portion of the screen. Compare this to the 600:1 contrast ratio LCD monitors that are offered currently.
If you don't know anything about HDR, check out this information from Siggraph 2003.
Soon, you may not want to render directly into the sun, you may go blind.
The 24 inch square panel emits 1200 lumens with a power consumption of about 80 watts ... This would make great wallpaper.
Let's see, 20W per square foot... 160W per foot of wall (assuming 8' ceilings)... that's around 5kW just for an 8' x 8' room.
They'll need to get the power consumption way down before this is useful for wallpaper.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Organic Semiconductor tech can use self-organizing and/or assembling nanotech procedures. This uses water and other raws. Using rather than fighting physical self-organizing trends of our Universe seems like a good approach. Don't fight Entropy - Use it.
More succinctly: dont't fight Thermodymanics, use it.
Why do GE get all proud about this phrase "with a power consumption of about 80 watts - on par with today's incandescent bulbs". Today's incandescent bulbs which are about 5 times less efficient than compact fluorescents, well hurray hurray for GE, I can't wait until they announce "a new xyz processor on a par with todays 486".
but 75000 lumens would seem to be a bit overdoing it for a 8'x8' room.
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
This type of thing initially made me wary of including myself. I thought that the subject was somehow involved in the reponses. However, as a psych study, (REAL TV on the Net), this is great.
Stay away from my kid you sick son of a b... oh, sorry, "overt". I thought you said "pervert".
It's a big solid continuous sheet, not a bunch of little individual elements.
So BUILD it as an array!
Geez...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
--
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where does the road paved with evil intentions lead to?
Can you say daylight stealth? Cover the bottom of a military jet or helicopter with OLED panels, then emit the same color as the surrounding sky. Or tanks. Or ships. Or....
Kodak, for one, has a fairly new camera with a pretty big (for a camera) OLED display, not to mention a 10x optical lens.
Anti-gravity? That was *my* little secret! But I never patented it! Boy, was *that* dumb!
Are you trying to imply that Botox is bad???
That's a 60.96 cm square, thus having a diagonal of 86.26 cm.
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
Kuro5hin? Hah! What a bunch of self-congratulating, pseudo-intellectual, hyphen-inducing morons.
When kuro5hin first was set up, every single freaking story had comments like "I'm glad we're so mature that we can discuss this, not like THAT OTHER SITE."
Nowadays they just have overblown, pompous comments that boil down to, approximately, "I like cheese."
Kuro5hin is full of people who would like to be better than everyone else, but can't think of how, so they just claim that they are. It reminds me of #c on freenode. They blabber and blabber and blabber about bullshit, without getting anything done.
Not that slashdot is extremely insightful these days, either.
"Brazil type misapplication of technologies"... care to clarify, please? or exemplify?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Kuro5hin? Hah!...
When kuro5hin first was set up...
Kuro5hin is full of people who...
Yeah you don't want to be over there. All they do is talk about kuro5hin. I'm glad you're above that.
We are creating displays which will be input devices and upon which we will launch many formal symbolic systems composed of graphic symbols. We will manipulate these symbols, interact with them, cause them to interact with each other and create new languages. The effects will be as dramatic, or more so, than the effects achieved by historically equivalent breakthroughs such as writing, printing, mathematical languages and the Internet itself. One step at a time, of course, but with the steps much closer together in time than in times past.
but I don't see how your observation detracts from the parent posters point. Unless the "light box" (I don't know the technical term) that converts the cylindrical CCFL source into one big flat 2D source via diffusion is incredibly lossy you're still dealing with the efficiency of the source itself. LCDs are light shutters. Their emissive efficiency depends on the source of white light. The advantage of tacking light emissive wallpaper on the back of an LCD would lie in its relative simplicity, lighter weight, lack of a high volta ge inverter/ballast, and thinner depth. Until OLED bulb-paper can match the power efficiency of the current design it offers no advantage whatsoever. 6 L/W wont cut it just because it's flat. You'll either get 1/10th the brightness or 1/10 the battery life.
The above calculations are another obvious example on why the imperial system so totally sucks.
Sorry, I know this is way offtopic, but every now and then it really strikes me.
recently I had to do calculations in inches and feet and tried hard not to defunc my keyboard with vomit.
C'mon! You signed and agreed to use SI in the mid seventies. Start using it!
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
no it's not stealing from anyone.
when I skip the commercials on my pvr I dont steal from anybody.. and only complete idiots and morons think that I am "stealing"
they want to force me to make them money? make slashdot a subscription only..
oh wait, it would die in 10 minutes if they did ithat.
only assholes think that by not looking at ad's you are stealing.
Atypical 42w (150 watt incandescent equiv. http://1000bulbs.com/category.php?category=859) screw-in compact flouro makes 2800 lumens. Thats 66lumens/watt. How is that 5x efficient?
Even a very high output T12 tube (http://1000bulbs.com/category.php?category=348) is only like like 58lumen/watt when new, tapering to an average of 40lumen/watt!
You want efficient? Well, High Pressure Sodium is EFFICIENT. Just can't use it to back light a computer screen.
Blar.
- and their reps switched it out every night because it was fading that fast.
;-)
Not all OLED have these problems, but certainly when they go for a show, you'd better have some backups
- (And, I hope, a great backlight for laptops.)
The backlight system on the Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP is simply a thin-film LED which coats the 240x160 pixel screen. When the backlight is on, it illuminates the pane which exists between the display layer(s) and the front of the device (or the user's 'eye'). The system is highly effective, and very simple to implement. Better for laptops, too, maybe.Informatus Technologicus
So what makes this invention a milestone? As far as I know a milestone is something that is specified beforehand. For example "the ultimate goal is a cheap, flexible display and lighting technology that can function with an efficiency of 100 lumens per watt" is clearly a milestone and this invention does not reach it.
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
I think a more apt analogy would be them announcing "a new quantum computer on par with todays 486".
:)
Its not the fact that they are matching old technology, its that the new technlogy is getting mature enough to start competing.
As cool as it would be to have a bleeding-edge 486 quantum computer, I'm gonna stick with my old-school P4 2.8Ghz computer. I have a feeling it'll run Half-Life 2 better...
It says 80 watts. You think that might mean something?
Infuriate left and right
This is great news for all those case modders out there. Instead of blue neon lighting around the edges, you can cover the entire case in a OLED sheet. Imagine the possibilities!
OLEC - Organic Light Emitting Case.
From the original post: "The 24 inch square panel emits 1200 lumens with a power consumption of about 80 watts - on par with today's incandescent bulbs...The ultimate goal is a cheap, flexible display and lighting technology that can function with an efficiency of 100 lumens per watt."
1200 lumens / 80 watts = 15 lumens per watt
Have they met their goal?
Go Gusties
But I look waaay sexier next to traditional lighting.
Nothing makes you uglier than a huge, wall sized plain white light.
Why use OLED as a backlight at all? I thought the wave of the future was going to be OLED as displays proper, not OLED backlights.
A H7 halogen headlight bulb, which draws 55 Watts of power at ~13 V, produces 1700 lumens. This is at the forefront of incandescent efficiency, producing 31 lumens per Watt, in a capsule that is about 1/2" x 1/4". This OLED is half as efficient, power consumption wise, and ~1/6500 as intense.
When you compare it to gaseous plasma lighting, it looks even worse. A DS2 HID bulb produces ~3100 lumens at 35 Watts. This is about 90 lumens/Watt, almost six times more efficient and nearly 48,000 times as intense.
I realize that these automotive bulbs are designed for something completely different than the OLED panels, but you have to compare these disparate technologies to assess how far the developing technology has to go, to be economically feasible. The reason I brought up the arc lamp, is because it is similar technology to the cold cathode lamps used for current laptop backlighting. True, an OLED display doesn't need backlighting, but it would have to be both more cost and power efficient than the conventional LCD + cold cathode lamp to displace the established technology. With the current state of this technology, it appears as though it still has a very long way to go, just to catch-up to the status quo.
I'm sure that there will be a company that will throw something similar to this into a laptop soon, and people will buy them because it is new and different. Will it be considered better?
Geek 1: "I have this new type of display, that's better than yours because it's OLED"
Geek 2: "Is it on? Why is it so dim?"
Geek 1: "It doesn't need a backlight like yours does and I can read it fine in the dark!"
Geek 2: "It feels like it's radiating heat."
Geek 1: "Yeah maybe, but that might be the 5.7 GHz. Xeon processor. Your laptop doesn't have that!"
Geek 2: "You're right, but I don't need to plug my laptop in all of the time."
With the geek laptops out there like the Alienware ones, I'm sure that the groundwork of expecting a laptop to be tethered to a wall socket has been well laid.
-- Len
That reminds me of a cute quote by the Director of the National Bank in 1898, regarding an early demonstration of the "Edison Telephone"...:
"It's a cute little toy, but what is it really good for?"
-tsb
toresbe
Yeah but will it keep my food fresh?
Since the imperial system does not, in fact, suck, nothing can be an "example" of such.
Unless you're growing weed, then it would be awesome.
I know of a few types of low light plants that
would LOVE that light if it was in the right
spectrum!
Venus Fly traps for one. 2'x2'? Yes, that would
do nicely.
Anyone have any links to USEFUL (for plants) info on these?
Can I have some of that crack you're smoking?
It's gotta be good, considering the totally altered state of reality you're in...
*grin*
The point is that you can OLEDs to form the display directly. By doing that you hardly lose any light and you even save power depending on the number of lit pixels.
It is kind of OT, but it is still about lighting.
Does anyone use full spectrum lights? Are they worth it?
I get two conflicting messages while reading about the subj on the Internet.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
The Samsung 172x has a 12 ms refresh rate. That is 80 frames per second. Can your eye discern or appreciate performance higher than this? Of course not.
Objection dismissed.
Entirely true. They haven't done that here though. Basic illumination is the only thing these panels will do. That's why the parent poster noted the superior efficiency of what's used today.
You have a point, but there are two issues here, the first; if the light is truely wall sized the luminosity per square inch will be so low you'll be able to look straight at it and not see anything "glowing." It'll just look like a white wall.
:)
The other issue is that it practical reasons will make full wall coverage an unusual application, mostly applied to public buildings which have no furnishings. In the home you'll just put a 6 inch wide strip of the stuff around the top of the room. Even with that small amount the luminosity per square inch will be so low that you can stare right at it, but you'll get a nice, diffuse "glow" throughout the room, much like natural light out of doors.
Put a rheostat on it, crank it down a bit, and light a candle, and you can also look as sexy as you want. Well, at least as sexy as you can.
KFG
First, know that frequency vs visibility is not a dicontinuous step function. Rather, sensitivity of the human eye to frequency is zero on the low frequency region, starts to increase as frequency goes through red, reaches a maximum at green, and then decreases smoothly to zero as you pass violet into ultra-violet. No doubt there is some variation with individuals, but you take a nominal bell-shaped curve of sensitivity vs frequency, and integrate power density at a given frequency times eye sensitivity across the spectrum of the light source to get a standard measure of how bright the light looks. A lumen is a standard measure of this visible power. It is essentially a milli-Watt, multiplied by a dimensionless factor which accounts for visibility of the color.
--Anonymous Coward, PhD
IIRC, the reason that fluorescent, high pressure sodium and LEDs can reach efficiencies above 30% or so is that unlike incandescent lights, they're not thermodynamic processes, and so aren't limited by the mathematics of blackbody radiation. Fluorescents ionize a gas whose atoms emit a photon when the electron returns to the lower state.
Normal household incandescents emit 95% of their energy in the infrared. Again IIRC, halogens are a kind of incandescent that emit relatively more visible light.
According to this link, LEDs with 'drive efficiencies' greater than 90% are available - this is just the first link I picked.
IIRC LEDs in general are the most efficient common light source available, and the longest lasting. Friends in the volunteer fire department use LED flashlights now, because their brightness is the same as regular flashlights but they can be left 'on' for almost a month before wearing the battery down. That's about 240 times better energy efficiency.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
But that is still pretty crappy in terms of efficiency. HMI film lights put out more than 75 lumens per watt. A 5,000 watt HMI (pretty common for film work...they come in 18kw) puts out 375,000 lumens with less power than your proposed wallpaper. Of course, its still way more power than you get from a wall socket and enough heat to make it very dangerous...
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
LEDs begin to fade after 3,000-to-4,000 hours
In our economy, where corporate survival depends upon consumtion and replacement, this seems to me to be an advantage.
Now you have to change your laptop / computer screen every year or so. Should make the powers that be in display technology very happy.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
I hear, with baited breath, all this stuff about OLEDS and how they'll have us get awesome huge displays on our livingroom walls.
I WANT IT RIGHT NOW! GET YOUR ARSES IN GEAR AND GET IT IN MY LIVINGROOM!
I just bought a 37" LCD panel for 4k but I *REALLY* want an 80" panel for the same price.
HURRY UP! PLEASE!
god forbid we use any math skills other than shifting a decimal point when calculating surface area...