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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.)
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.
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)
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
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.
Yes, but in a TFT display you lose close to 90% of your light to the TFT and Liquid Crystal panel. So if your backlights efficiency is 60 lumen/W the total display efficiency is more like 6 lumen/W, even neglecting the the power consumption for the panel..
"But hey, at least its organic."
So is botulism toxin and dioxin and PCB's. Just because something is organic doesn't make it good.
Veramocor
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
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".
If its that thin and light, I'd happily just mount it as the side of my case; how convenient would that be?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
but 75000 lumens would seem to be a bit overdoing it for a 8'x8' room.
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I still wonder how much heat these generate. I certainly wouldn't want to line my walls with hundreds of watts of electricity being coverted into heat (and light). =)
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their life can be extended dramatically by blinking them at ~60hz. they have a better lifetime than the electroluminesent panels used in older laptops and most cheaper consumer LCD displays.
the cool part is that OLED's dont require 120volts at 400hz to illuminate so they are very useful for many lcd backlights that are on at most 3-4 minutes a day... like in your remote control, your Mp3 player backlight, your watch, etc....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The strange thing is that if you made the screen from LEDs, with a miniature lens on each pixel so the light goes mostly where it is wanted, the efficiency would be more than double that of the LCD plus backlight!
Has technology taken a wrong turn here, I wonder.
The problem with using LEDs simplistically is that without the lens, the light output is Lambertian, so a lot of it goes where it is not wanted, straying into adjacent pixels that are supposed to be dark for a start.
There has been much talk of ferroelectric and other new forms of display, these like LCD are based on blocking the light rather than controlling its creation, however they might manage better efficiency. But with a single white light source, you still need to divide it unequally into three colours by selective filtering, so two thirds (very roughly) is gone for a start. Now, if you can integrate the pixels on top of dots of colour phosphor which emit only light of the colour relevant to the pixel, you might get a very good improvement, but it would mean integrating the backlight and the LCD in one structure. Also, the surface area of a large flat fluorescent would kill its efficiency, I think. (In the above, I mean sub-pixels, i.e. the red, green or blue, not the pixel, which effectively can take any colour.)
I expect that something new, and a bit better than what we have now, will eventually come along, and when it does, it will be so obvious that everyone will wonder why it did not happen 10 years ago. Some would-be inventor out there maybe has the answer now, but not the money....