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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.)
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).
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--
Edison's first bulb >>> 1.4 lumens per watt
s /L B26efficient.htm
Modern 60 Watt bulb >>> 960 lumens
from here
http://www.ysartglass.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Bulb
.
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.
A 100 watt incanscent light bulb puts out about 1600 lumens. or ~16 Lumen/watt
OLED 1200l/80w = 15 Lumen/watt
A compact florescent is ~1750l/29w = 60 Lumen/watt
cold cathode tubes are at about 65l/w
So these OLEDs have a long way to go effieciency wise before we get them in our portable computers.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
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.
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.
Hardcore gamers avoid LCDs because even the fastest with 14ms/16ms pixel rise/fall times are not acceptable if you want to meet or exceed equal competition.
From a users perspective, OLED is the "perfect" display technology in terms of visual quality and response times. It's got the gorgeous bightness and contrasts levels present in LCDS, and the refresh times and sharpness present in CRTs. I will sell my soul for these when they arrive, providing their lifespan is decent.
"OLEDs begin to fade after 3,000-to-4,000 hours" vs LCDs which "generally have a life expectancy of around 100,000 hours"
I was under the impression that LCD displays have an indefinite lifespan if the CCFT is accessable for replacement. The average CCFT bulb costs less than $13 from JKL Lamps and is a pretty inexpensive way to keep an LCD monitor going.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
If you don't want to wait, you could build a simple Fresnel lens projector for around $40. Get some foam board for mounting, some kind of gaffer's tape or duct tape, and a cheap sheet lens - and fill your wall with your monitor/tv image. Sure, it's not a "smart" wall, but it's a whole lot cheaper and you own some of the parts already.
Well, that's assuming you can rotate your screen image 180 degrees without breaking your monitor. These lenses do invert images, and I won't get into optical science. AFAIK NVidia cards in Windows have a Rotation setting in their control panel, and mplayer has a command line option for this. Most monitors don't like being rotated (magnetic adjustment yokes are set properly for being upright) and will break if you leave them upside down and powered on.
I think you meant 'per square foot of wall', right? And did you take into account 4, 5, or 6 of the faces of a cube? Minus windows and doors?
The amount of light this would put out would be enormous. Figuring about half a million lumens (which are not exactly a measurement of intensity, like lux or footcandles would be) you're looking at the equivalent of around 120 of those 100W fluorescent tubes. That kind of light is what lights an entire large department store like K-Mart, Best Buy, Staples or Media Play to appreciable brightness. If all that light were concentrated upon one spot, that spot would be something around 500 times brighter than a bright white cloud on a sunny day at noon. (The cloud would be 3,500 footlambert, or 1,114 candela/square foot) The darkest object you would be able to see with that in your vision (assuming your eyes could adjust to such intense light levels) would still be brighter than daylight. You would pretty much go blind instantly when you flipped the light switch. But you could light up an entire department store / street with it.
Brazil
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
First off, the monitor is designed to radiate heat away from the tube and controlling electronics (which typically sit at the "bottom" of the monitor case). Flipping the monitor upside down effectively cooks the electronics, unless you re-orient them, or put in place forced-air cooling (aka, a fan).
Secondly, there is the issue of support - that is, the tube is held in place by various parts with the assumption that it will be in a certain orientation most of the time. Change that orientation, and the supports may fail. So, you would have to re-engineer these as well.
While it is true the monitor may change funky colors due to its new alignment with the earth's magnetic field, this can be corrected in a shop - sometimes you just need to demagnetize the monitor (ie, unplug it and replug it in an hour later). Other times there are internal adjustments to make (look into using a monitor from say the northern hemisphere in Australia, for instance).
Actually, for you to get this projector to work properly, you will likely need to do two things: turn the image upside down, and reverse it. You can do this optically with a mirror, however you will lose light intensity (plus, unless you are using front surface mirrors, you will get abberation issues).
The best way to do both involves flipping wires on the control yoke of the tube - basically you have to reverse the horizontal deflection magnet connections, and either reverse the same on the vertical, or rotate the whole assembly 180 degrees to get it upside down. All of this can be a very hazardous operation - if you have never worked on a monitor before, *** STAY AWAY ***. One screwup and you can easily be killed, or seriously injured if you are lucky. Keep one hand in a pocket at all times. Drain the capacitive voltage off the tube before and during working on it. Even if it has been setting for a while, charge can build up in it (all capacitors can do this) - so always drain them (and don't use the screwdriver trick - not only can you ruin the monitor, but you may also destroy certain drive electronics - drain it through a large resistor instead).
There are several documents on the internet about how to screw with monitors, safety precautions to take, etc. If you are set on doing this, and you feel you have the background to try (ie, you didn't just pick up a soldering iron that afternoon for the first time), study all of them, and follow *every* precaution. Do not take any shortcuts.
Be safe...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
That just isn't true. Liquid crystal display backlighs emit polarized light which all but eliminates wasted light. The issue with LCDs is that the backlight is constantly on, even when a pixel is "dark". Organic light emitting devices (diodes if you prefer) emit a very narrow band of visible light (no IR, UV, etc.) that is tunable, and only consumes energy when a pixel is actually generating light. An LCD also uses colored filters (more wasted light) to generate color displays whereas OLEDs use different emissive species for different colors. If you ever get a chance to see an Alq3 based green OLED in person, you will realize why this technology is promising.
The sticking point for current OLED technology is lifetime. An LCD display can function for years while the best OLED would be lucky to useable after a year or two.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.