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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.)
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.
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".
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'...
Because Oled's can be used as power efficent computer monitors( ie laptop monitors), and televisions. It definately has applications in mobile military functions (that computer screen thing again). It promises to be extremely cheap because they can produce it in huge sheets like construction paper. It has the ability to be extremely flexible, as in saran wrap. Also, OLEDs are are brightness adjustable. Sodium lamps throw out 10's of thousands of lumens with no way to dim it. ------- I am excited about these Oleds.
Because unlike any of the other technologies, these things are thin and flexible(in form and function). I don't think you'd find it very easy to wrap a HPS lamp around a barricade divider at an off-ramp, or along the rear bumper of a construction vehicle. You can print an oled in the shapes you want instead of having to put a light behind a mask.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
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.
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I wonder how much coal, water and other materials are required to create one clean 80W monitor ;).
I can't wait to have this personnal foldable / rollable 24 inch monitor i could bring with me on lan parties, instead of a 30kg 21" ...
And i would really enjoy having my electricity bill reduced by the same rate as the weight
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.
I hate to disagree, but laser is one example of a technology that had applications before the technology itself was available!
For example, holography was invented before the laser itself.
In the early days of holography (1947), they used mercury arc lamps as a source of "coherent" light, but couldn't get very far with it, as it was not nearly coherent enough for the purpose. Development of holography basically stalled until the invention of the laser in 1960
Say no to software patents.
--
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!
I hate to disagree, but laser is one example of a technology that had applications before the technology itself was available!
The applications may have been there but the inventors weren't aware of them. They were doing basic research. Arthur Schawlow, who was one of the inventors of the laser at Bell Labs, said "We thought it might have some communications and scientific uses, but we had no application in mind. If we had, it might have hampered us and not worked out as well."
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.
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
What really matters is that the energy will divide 3 ways, heat (bad), out of band light (UV, very bad, IR just bad) and visible light. (For the pedantic, there may also be a trace of acoustic or RF emissions, but in either case a small fraction of a watt would have such nuisance value that it would not be allowed.) You need to know what fraction of the energy is visible, and the spectral distribution, is it white or an aceptable approximation?
AFAIK, a normal LED can get to about 22% (depending on colour) while a high-efficiency fluorescent can get about 70%, but these figures will have changed since my brain had its last update.
There will be a definite limit imposed by the laws of physics, normal LEDs are hitting this now, and despite what one may read in the press, will not ever replace fluorescents for general lighting. They are not even appropriate for bicycle headlights, for which they are sold, and are utterly inappropraite for car headlights, despite the best efforts of one of the more incompetent European lighting manufacturers. In both cases an optimised gas discharge source of some sort (i.e. fluorescent) would be best, preferably not like these vile headlights with the excessive UV content used by BMW, which surprisingly has not yet landed them in court. (It will.....) In fact they are struggling to get double the efficiency of quartz-halogen, which is only a bit better than normal tungsten. I don't know the physics of an OLED, but it will have a definite limit, and I suspect will not be particularly impressive.
Factor in cost and life, and general use of these things will be a long way off, none of which is intended to denigrate the good work which has gone into the concept in any way. Research like this should be done, the mistake is to allow the marketing men to create expectations which cannot be satisfied due to the physics.
I will be sticking to the highest efficiency miniature fluorescents for my domestic lighting, probably for a long time, but when something which is actually better comes along, I will make the change willingly. It was a no-brainer to replace ordinary tungsten bulbs with fluorescents, it will need a bit of thought next time, because there is not nearly as much scope left for efficiency improvement, since you can't get to 100%.
It's not entirely "doofey". In a convential LCD panel, the backlight is the most power-hungry part. On the other hand, a practical OLED display is still a ways off, mostly due to the lifetime of the blue-emitting component. However, if, in the mean time, they can make a practical white-emitting panel (that is more efficient than current backlights), then it may serve as a reasonable intermediate step until the OLED display itself is made practical.