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.)

Comments

Needs efficiency AND durability

[PoisonousPhat]

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?

Re:Needs efficiency AND durability

[wwwillem]

Those 100,000 hours were not achieved "at once". I remember when I worked 10 years ago for an LCD manufacturer, how many problems there were initially with durability. Those things need a bit of time.

It's in this context always nice to ask people: "What do you think lasts longer, a car or a lightbulb". The answer is nearly always "a car" allthough it is more or less the same. Let's assume a car drives 100,000 miles, at 50 mph, that makes a lifetime of just 2000 hours. Which isn't much....

Re:Flourescents put out 80 lumens per watt

[LoveTheIRS]

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.

Re:Flourescents put out 80 lumens per watt

[gerardrj]

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.

Impact to the environment ?

[toofanx]

I wonder how much coal, water and other materials are required to create one clean 80W monitor ;).

Now you see me....

[photonX]

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.

Re:Now you see me....

[awol]

There was a show on the BBC (perhaps "Science Shack", but at least the same presenter, Adam Hart-Davies... a little more research [google is your friend] shows it was Science Shack, programme 2, http://www3.open.ac.uk/media/image-bank/programmes .asp) in which they went through a few techniques to make yourself invisible. The image from the program in the link above is the "mirrored suit", which when you are in a forest actually kinda works. However, they did actually make a car with an industrial strength active display on one side and cameras on the other side to capture what was behind the vehicle and show it on the screen. Really cool. It worked. As a stationary vehicle it was almost impossible to see (they had "experts" to try and spot it in the forest). However as it moved the vehicle was easier to spot. All in all a really cool attempt to show how such technology does (and does not) work.