Samsung Announces Largest-Ever OLED Display

kaos.geo writes "Samsung announces a 17" OLED display. The article specifies that they are using a laser to 'print' the display instead of the previous 'spraying' methods." 400 lumens isn't shabby. Update: 05/18 23:49 GMT by T : jhealy writes "Seiko Epson, on the heels and light years ahead of Samsungs announcement earlier today, have announced a 40" OLED monitor. Eat that Samsung!"

Comments

Prices?

[Kid Zero]

Man... we're just getting prices on LCD's down. Now this? Egads.

Also: Can you game with it? :)

A 17" display, huh? Intriguing.

[Tuxedo Jack]

400 lumens isn't half bad at all.

What I'd like to know is how good the contrast is? The monitor's not worth crap if the color isn't decent.

Re:A 17" display, huh? Intriguing.

[pbox]

According to OLED rumors, it is excellent (ie. better than anything we have currently) out-of-the-box. However after a year you will notice fading, and in two years it will be worse than LCD.

Re:A 17" display, huh? Intriguing.

[OrthodonticJake]

Tech support will have a field day with that fading thing, I bet.
Consumer: "Why can't I see it?"
Tech Support: "Do we have your money?"
Consumer: "Yes."
Tech Support: "Run awaaaaayyyyyy!"

Expected delivery at a resonable price.

[LPrime]

I am still waiting for the prices of LCD monitors to drop to make it worth the switch from my trusted CRT. Based on what I have seen with the progression of LCDs into the mainstream it will take at least 5 years for something like this to become affordable. By then we will have 3D displays slowly hitting the market.

Decay problems..

[VMaN]

But are the problems of decaying OLEDs fixed now? the first ones only lasted a couple of years if I remember correctly.

Re:Decay problems..

[MoonBuggy]

Samsung already use them in their phones (E700, E710, E715 and maybe others) so I would hope that they've fixed it - my brother isn't going to be happy if the outer screen on his phone fades away in a year or two.

Re:Decay problems..

[Mr. Roadkill]

But are the problems of decaying OLEDs fixed now? the first ones only lasted a couple of years if I remember correctly.

If they get cheap enough, and there's a reasonable recycling program, who cares? Why not consider the optical component a consumable? So long as the initial purchase price plus the cost of a few replacement optical units is less than the purchase price of competing technologies, the consumer wins.

The only problem with this is that it potentially opens up a whole new product to the "razor handle" marketing model. If we go down this path, I think the best option would be for standards to be set early, so people can make purchasing decisions based on openness of standards and product quality - if you don't care, buy that < insert developing country that undercuts China in price and quality > replacement insert, but if you want the best, buy the Big Brand or Quality OEM one. If it goes the razor or printer way, I guess I could live with it - but I'd much prefer it if it went the same way as the lightbulb.

Re:Decay problems..

[Mr. Roadkill]

I care, because I'd rather pay a little more for something that lasts longer. Maybe I'm a fool. Or maybe I just find a small amount of pleasure in stability.

Stability is wonderful, and in some applications highly desirable.

Yes, I buy flourescent bulbs instead of incandescents where possible :)

As do I. They're more expensive than incandescents, but they last much longer. Sure, you have reduced maintenance requirements with fluorescents (and perhaps reduced costs associated with that, even though they cost more initially) but their killer benefit is their power consumption. What if they consumed near enough to the same power as incandescents, and what if they lasted four times as long as incandescents, but also cost eight times as much? What if this was because your fluorescent light was integrated with its fixture and you needed to replace the whole fixture every 5 years, but you just put a new incandescent bulb in the incandescent fixture every two years until the fixture finally broke (maybe 10 years, if you're lucky). That's probably a fair comparison to an LCD display vs. OLED with Replaceable Panel

With current display devices, once the parts that actually produce the image die it is generally not economical to repair the device. If the optical part was replaceable, and the costs worked out to be less over time than the cost of competing technologies with non-replaceable parts, it's a winner. And that's the kicker - the production costs for OLED panels are likely to fall much further than the production costs for LCD panels, so unless there are environmental costs that make recycling OLED panels uneconomical a replaceable-panel OLED display device could be a very compelling option in many applications and for many users.

And I'm considering LCD over DLP (replaceable bulb) or Plasma (trash in five years or after accidentally leaving the nintendo on).

I have no idea what the current state-of-play is in the LCD or DLP product ranges, but even though one has consumables involved (DLP) what are the overall expected lifespans of the devices? If DLP cost significantly less than LCD, then DLP would be the winner in applications where occasional globe replacement and the physical differences between the two technologies aren't an issue - I imagine this would be most loungerooms. Like I imagine the occasional replacement of an OLED insert once you can no longer adjust out the loss of green performance would not be an issue for most laptop or even desktop users if the technology cost significantly less than LCD panels .

But then, who am I fooling about costs over a product lifetime - the initial cost would have to be lower too, because we're probably talking about the same people who buy low-end inkjet printers. Lets just hope that if replaceable-panel displays appear they don't follow that consumables pricing strategy.

Re:Decay problems..

[ndege]

MOD PARENT DOWN!

Dude, shut up and think before you speak. You don't know what you are talking about. I spent about 10 seconds looking up the bulb for my Infocus X1 (a DLP projector). The price is under $300 with a 4000 hour life! That comes to about 7.5 cents per hour for the cost to operate. A link: http://www.compuplus.com/insidepage.php3?id=100227 3

It is people like you that call into my help desk to tell me that I need to replace their computer because their "screen is black" and has been for 2 weeks. Their system came back to life when the surge protector was turned on.

You are a good example of natural selection gone wrong.

Re:Decay problems..

[anakin876]

WTF? Bulbs on some of the Barco CRT projectors do run you 400 or 500 bucks. At my university surplus sale you can buy a projector with a burnt out bulb for 75 bucks because it isn't worth it to them to pay for a new bulb. I realize that DLP is different, and that 7.5 cents an hour is insanely cheap (who wouldn't pay say 30 cents a week to watch 4 hours of delightful video?) But many people can't see that, and can't justify the large expense. You are a good example of arrogance gone horribly wrong...let me guess you charged that poor bastard 200 bucks to tell them to turn the damn surge protector back on

Re:Decay problems..

[FireFury03]

Except phone screens are off most of the time and only light up for brief periods when you're using them.

Re:Decay problems..

[takasuz]

According to a local newspaper (Nagano, Japan), the present estimated lifespan for the prototype is 1000-2000 hours, which needs to be boosted to 10000 hours before appearing in your living room.

That might be nice...

[LeBlanc_Joey]

for laptops, if there are power savings.

Re:That might be nice...

[rokzy]

>for laptops

being only 1/3 the thickness of LCDs is handy too

How good is this?

[coupland]

Can anyone shed some light on exactly how noteworthy this is? What is a rough figure for expected brightness (in lumens) from an LCD? How big a deal is 400 lumens for a first-generation consumer product? Are the advantages of OLED primarily brightness and power consumption, or are there image quality advantages as well?

Thanks in advance to any OLED gurus who feel like sharing their knowledge. This is an exciting field but a lot of us are still trying to get up to speed on it...

Re:How good is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

LCDs are now starting to get crazily, blindingly bright--in an attempt to jack contrast ratios up over 500:1. Contrast ratio is important, but since backlit LCDs can't display black, the darkest black isn't that dark and that's static. So the only thing left to do is crank up the bright end.

OLEDs on the other hand can actually display black, therefore they can have a higher contrast ratio without being so bright. The net effect is that they are nicer to look at.

Also, some would say that it's easier to make bigger OLED displays than LCD displays. I don't know about that. 1600x1200 isn't very common for desktop LCDs, but I've seen it available in laptops for years now.

Frankly for most people it's a minor change. It's definitely a _potential_ improvement though.

Re:How good is this?

[tunabomber]

One big advantage that I would expect OLED's to have over LCD's that no one has been talking about is refresh rate.
Unlike LCD's, OLED's don't rely on a structural transformation of the molecules in the display to shift a pixel from one state to the next.
This should mean that the pixels can switch from "on" to "off" much faster, hopefully fast enough for the screen to be used for gaming.

Re:How good is this?

[aggiefalcon01]

Here's another advantage of OLED's: flexibility. The displacy surface can easily be bent, flexed, and straightened. Or, it can be attached to a round surface.

Think of a device which you pull apart while the display surface unrolls out of the larger half as you're pulling it out (like older window shades). Hollywood showed us this device in the movie Red Planet. True, just the possibility of this is a long way off, but OLED's are a step in this direction.

GearBits has a cool animation of a pen using this technology.

Re:How good is this?

[anethema]

What do you mean no one talks about it? That's one of the main advantages of OLED over LCD that everyone mentions when the OLED topic comes up is its ability to change state from on to off MUCH faster.

Yes it will be useful for gaming. OLED delays are measured in microseconds, not milliseconds.

Also, the contrast ratio of OLED displays are MUCH better than LCD, which are still piss-poor at best.

LCD almost has the display angle problems licked, usually on the more expensive monitors. What's good about OLED is this isn't even an issue. Like CRT, you can turn it however you want.

While LCD power consumption IS low...OLED is even lower than backlit LCD.

And then there is cost. OLED screens are just printed on. With inkjet tech usually, although it's laser in this case. There is no high voltage circuitry necessary for fluorescent backlighting, no tubes, no expensive-to-produce LCD panel. Sure the initial costs of OLED might be high to justify the r&d, but the cost to produce an OLED screen is a fraction of that of LCD.

But wait...

[bobhagopian]

The article says "To date, however, problems with device lifetime, chemistry and production have limited their use to mobile devices and backlights." But it does not say that these problems have been completely eliminated. I'd be wary of buying a $2000 display with a lifetime of seventeen minutes.

Re:But wait...

[falzer]

I told you a million times not to use hyperbole to get your point across!

Re:But wait...

[maxbang]

I'd be wary of buying a $2000 display with a lifetime of seventeen minutes.

Tell me about it. I spent $2000 for seventeen minutes of bliss. I wish I was wary before my purchase. Or was it a rental?

Re:But wait...

[nhavar]

Sha! Your lucky it was a rental. I got talked into the purchase and didn't read the fine print about how I'd only get 17 minutes of bliss once a year and have to keep paying a "re-up" fee. If I chose not to pay the re-up fee and terminate the contract or look for an alternate bliss carrier I'd be charged an early termination fee which could legally be up to half of what I own PLUS continuing annual fees.

400 Lumens?

[ackthpt]

I've got a Samsung Syncmaster 172t (250cd/m2) and it's more than bright enough on the lowest setting. Maybe if you like to watch video with the sun hitting the screen this would be fine.

For a computer monitor it's serious overkill. I can't seem to turn the brightness down enough so have to work with a light on to avoid headaches.

Re:400 Lumens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get some sunglasses. Polarized if you really want to reduce the light reaching your eyes from the LCD monitor.

Re:400 Lumens?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't directly compare lumens to candela unless you're a sphere of 1m radius around your monitor.

Re:400 Lumens?

[Gramie2]

Maybe they should have a dial that goes up to 11?

Re:400 Lumens?

[servognome]

sphere of 1m radius around a computer monitor... I think that describes most /.'ers

Enviromental Impact

[Frigid Monkey]

Organic LEDs are luminescent plastic semiconductors with the theoretical potential to replace LCDs, CRTs and other display technologies through greater efficiency, easier production, more physical flexibility and lower cost.

Are there any environmental changes with these monitors, personally I always make an effort to shop greener and if I could avoid purchasing a CRT in favor of something that would biodegrade nicely well WOO HOOO! I'd be making planters out of my old monitors.

On the other hand: MONITOR MOLD

Re:Enviromental Impact

[pyrote]

they already beat ya to it...
here

Inconsistent Color Lifetimes

[MBoffin]

Nice as it would be to have one of these, it will be a few years before they are worth buying. One major drawback is that the green component of these screens have a shorter lifetime than the red and blue, not to mention an overall shorter lifetime than LCD's. The early LCD's were not so bad, even with a shorter lifetime, because all three colors decayed at relatively the same rate. With OLED's having a shorter lifetime for green, the color drift will be much more dramatic.

Re:Inconsistent Color Lifetimes

[MrBlue VT]

Can't this simply be corrected via software? Just decay the other colors as well to keep the color calibration the same.

Re:Inconsistent Color Lifetimes

[stryck9]

Actually, it is the blue that decays the fastest. Red and green are about the same.

pffft

[fresh27]

400 lumens is nothing. i have a raid array of lightbulbs thatll beat this amateur in any benchmark.

Re:pffft

[LaBlueCow]

Not to nitpick, but wouldn't an array of lightbulbs be a RAIL, not a RAID?
On a completely off topic topic... RAIRRA... - redundant array of infinitely recursive redundant arrays of ...

Re:pffft

[Anonymous Coward]

i have a raid array of lightbulbs

I think that would be a RAIL. :-P

But, seriously, you bring up a good point, although inadvertently.

Organic LED displays essentially have a little lightbulb (LED, actually) for each subpixel, so it is an "AIL" (Array of Inexpensive LEDs). But there is no redundancy. If one dies, you lose that pixel forever. LEDs have a limited lifetime, but it's far longer than the regular lightbulb that you joke about. A normal LED has a lifetime of around 100,000 hours for monochromatic chips (a bit over ten years of continuous use), but there is a Gaussian distribution around that. When you are talking about a 1600x1200 display, with 5,760,000 individiual subpixels, you're going to see some failures within a few years, guaranteed. And once they flake out, there's no realistic way to repair them.

LCDs, by contrast, are illuminated by one or two cold-cathode tubes with a shiny surface behind the display to distribute the light evenly, which goes through the LCD panel and out to your eyes. The LCD subpixels do not die over time, but sometimes are defective originally in the LCD matrix (thus giving you dead or stuck pixels). The best cold cathode tubes used LCDs have lifetimes of around 30,000 hours of continuous use (about 3.5 years), although they can theoretically be replaced when they fail. However, this is not typically done (except under warranty) because they are not of standard designs. (You can't just go to CompUSA and pick up a replacement cold cathode tube for your LCD.)

The real upshot of all of this is that no matter which fancy flat-panel display you get, turn it off when you aren't using it. :-)

Re:pffft

[capricious23]

Actually when OLEDs die, they don't simply stop working. The voltage at which they turn on begins to shift higher over time. With the right active matrix circuitry, you can compensate for this and extend the lifetime of the device.

Missing poins?

[Zinic]

I think that people are missing the relevance of new OLED advancements. Although maybe not suited to desktop and laptop environments OLED remains an extremely elegant solution to a whole slew of other devices. MP3...PDA...etc... Think of having a pen that could double as a PDA with a nice hi res, low power, display that doesn't strain the eyes.

Re:Missing poins?

[jnik]

I'm not sure how a 17" display would be relevant to MP3 or PDA devices. Nor, on the other end, how a display small enough to fit on a pen would be of much use.

The whole point of this announcement is BIG. BIG means CRT and LCD replacement. I can see more use for a 17" OLED in, say, one of the much-reviled net-enabled refrigerators or similar devices where a large screen and low duty cycle is required.

Re:Missing poins?

[DeltaSigma]

You're thinking of FOLEDs and SOLEDs.
Flexible Organic LEDs, and Stacked Organic LEDs.

FOLEDs use the nature of Organic LEDs to make a more versatile viewing surface. One that can be rolled and contorted as much as, say, a thin sheet of plastic. I do not, however, reccomend trying to bend it.

SOLEDs use the transparency of Organic LEDs to stack red green and blue on top of each other. This gives every single pixel the entire range of color, thereby tripling the resolution for any given display surface. When this hits the market a 15" SOLED display will be more desirable than a 21" LCD display.

Competition

[manitoulinnerd]

I realize that existing LCD technology is expensive to produce but if im lucky the impending obsolescence of the LCD will drive prices down to where I can afford them. The OLED is amazing though. When you think of all of the possibilities, not just for displays. Think glowing wallpaper, hell it could even display images. Of course this is all dependent on an extreme price drop but the term "computer desk" could have quite a different meaning.

Re:3M

[ackthpt]

Is it me or 3M is everywhere?

Someone care to explain about their R&D process?

Ya, dey yoos de finest viking immigrents of Meenesota, yoo know? 3M = Meenesota Mining & Manufacturing.

BTW, even notice ITT is into hotels and everything but doesn't seem too much involved in telecommunications anymore? It's called diversification.

Epson 40"

[mattlamb]

Epson wins again... here is the cutline from a photo on the wire service.

JAPAN EPSON TOPIX
A model displays a prototype of Epson's new OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display in Tokyo Tuesday, May 18, 2004. The maker claims it's the world's largest (40-inch) full-color organic display. Using the printer maker's inkjet technology, the self-luminescent OLED offers high contrast, wide viewing angle, and fast response. The company is thus gearing up towards commercialization in 2007. (AP Photo/Katsumi Kasahara)

Re:Epson 40"

[RedWizzard]

Epson wins again...

Seiko Epson's 40" is a prototype, with commercialization (ie production) expected in 2007. Seiko have not said what the actual production size or resolution will be. Samsung's 17" is also a prototype, but is much closer to production. Size, resolution, and other specifications are already determined and you will be able to buy it next year. the Seiko product is much more vapourous so I give this round to Samsung.

contrast is almost moot

[SuperBanana]

What I'd like to know is how good the contrast is?

Contrast isn't an issue, because unlike LCD panels which backlight the whole panel and rely on "hiding" the backlight for "black"(but plenty escapes anyway if the backlight is too bright). On an OLED panel, if a pixel is off, it generates absolutely no light. Theoretical contrast is then essentially infinite; zero:something is infinite. The only remaining issue is how bright "on" is, and that's been specified as 400 lumens.

What is even better is the resolution. The specified 1600x1200; in a 17" panel, that's quite nice, as previously it was 1280x1024 tops.

Re:contrast is almost moot

[avalys]

The specified 1600x1200; in a 17" panel, that's quite nice, as previously it was 1280x1024 tops.

That's funny, because there's a 1600x1200 15" panel perched on my lap right now.

Re:contrast is almost moot

[magefile]

1600x1200 15" panel perched on my lap right now.

Is it an OLED? Didn't think so. And if it is, WTF are you doing reading /.? Shouldn't you be off doing something only rich people do?

Re:contrast is almost moot

[njh]

The contrast can't be infinite unless the off LEDs reflect no light either. Otherwise the contrast of printed paper would be 0 (no light emitted for either black or white).

Re:contrast is almost moot

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you settle for 17" LCDs that can display UXGA (1600x1200), at $369?
http://store.yahoo.com/saveateaglestore/del 1717in1 7f.html

Re:contrast is almost moot

[thedji]

WTF are you doing reading /.?

By the sounds of it, squinting.

Not quite the largest...

[Samah]

Don't know if anyone noticed the "feedback" bit at the bottom, but there's a link to another review on the Seiko Epson 40" OLED display.

http://www.forbes.com/business/businesstech/newswi re/2004/05/18/rtr1374939.html

no surprise

[moviepig.com]

[The organic units] problems with device lifetime, chemistry and production have limited their use...

Indeed, those are long-standing problems with us organic units, too.

(Well, production hasn't been such a problem, I guess...)

Finally a decent resolution...

[httpamphibio.us]

1600x1200 on a 17" is more like it.

I've always wondered why I could buy an entire laptop for less than what it would cost to buy a standalone LCD. For example, my laptop has a 1920x1200 15.4" widescreen display and I paid $950 for it. If you could find a standalone display with those specs (which you can't... or at least not the last time I checked) it would cost a couple grand.

Let's hope this is the beginning of high quality displays with high resolutions, and keep our fingers crossed about the price. :)

Luminant Green

[Digitus1337]

Active matrix organic light emitting diode displays... ARE MADE OF PEOPLE!

Lower res though

[SuperKendall]

Pixels the size of your fist at that size!!

Well, not quite, but it's not 1600x1200. And it's meant to be a TV.

Solution to "lifetime" problem

[blair1q]

Now that these things can be printed, make the screen area itself modular, and sell the modules for cheap, way less than $100. Sell the rest of the monitor (body, power supply, connectors, DVI electronics, etc) for a normal monitor price.

Then, every 2-3 years, when most people upgrade anyway, they can pop out the now-funky-colored screen module, pop in a replacement, and get back to fragging little OLED-sharpened nazis.

Organic PORN!

[niko9]

Oh wait, most of the geeks here already have organic material sprayd on their monitors. Never mind, false alarm!

nice document on OLED displays

[Doppler00]

Doing a quick search on google I found this

Shows a lot of useful information regarding OLED screens.

Best personal solution.

[niko9]

Got tired of waiting for the perfect monitor, if there will ever be such a thing, and resorted to having a CRT and and LCD on the desk. The CRT is my gaming monitor, the LCD for everything else.

DONT MOD PARENT INSGHTFUL, MAYBE FUNNY

[orasio]

LCD monitors emit polarized light, if you use polarized glasses, it will be black, not dark, at least most of the times.

Re:which laptop is this?

[httpamphibio.us]

HP Pavilion zt3000. 1.4ghz Pentium-M, 30gb, 384MB, CD-RW. I bought it just before Christmas when they were having some pretty hefty rebate and coupon deals. I think there was a $150 mail-in rebate, $50 instant online rebate, and I had a 10% off coupon, plus 3% of from fatwallet.com, and free two day shipping (from Shanghai!)

Eat what Samsung?

[Traa]

The Samsung OLED is a working prototype of a 17" computer display running at 1600x1200. Product launch will be next year.

The Seiko Epson is only an anouncment about a 40" TV display that will be productized for 2007 (marketing speak for..."our engineers just laughed at us so we made up some numbers").

But this stuff is already organic

[dabisa]

Why would they even try to make a monitor out of that fake fat stuff. It was bad enoug that they put in the potato chips. If this thing over heats it will just be a big puddle on you desk.

Why not use a printing press?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

So Samsung is using a laser to print them one-by-one, and Seiko Epson is using ink jet printers ditto.

An OLED screen is just a sheet of substrate with various inks on it.

Why don't they just use a rotary printing press?

Think "newspaper".

Print screens as much as, say, 40 feet tall, by as long as you like, with the connectors for the modular electronics occurring periodically.

At, say, 50 MPH. Until that enormous roll of substrate is exhausted - then thread in another.

On their way out of the press just slit them into strips (i.e. five 8-foot strips for wallpaper), chop them into convenient lengths, and stack them up into bales.

Print the LEDs right up to the cut lines so you can tile a large surface if you want. Or leave a margin for making connections to a one-sided screen print job. (You might even be able to fold the edge over to get the connector onto the back and thus get even one-sided screens to butt together for tiling.)

(Of course you'd have to use different masters for some screen sizes, so the cut lines would occur at convenient places.)

Drop a sheet into a "monitor" picture-frame, with the electronics connecting via contact fingers. Or mount driver chips on the back (to the printed power and signal wiring) if you want to paste 'em up on a wall - and apply power and signal under the baseboard.

You should be able to manufacture replacable sheets for a monitor for a couple bucks. The drive electronics is nothing special. Maybe $25 manufacturing cost for a wall-mount high-res HDTV monitor.

Sell it for a hundred or two, and replacement screens for twenty, and I'd buy several (and a stack of spare screens) even if I'd have to replace the screen a couple times a year. B-)

Re:Why not use a printing press?

[Ateryx]

Why don't they just use a rotary printing press?

Unfortunately I believe its a touch more complicated. PC Mag notes because of the sensitivity of the materials in the process "this calls for a more complex fabrication process. Also, any exposure to air or moisture destroys OLEDs, so the materials must be perfectly sealed."

Applied Films I think explains the problem best:

The deposition of the organic layers itself is critical too, because of the sensitivity of the material (e.g., high temperature, incorporation of dust and dirt). The high price of the coating material also makes high material utilization a priority.

Not that it matters but IAMICE (majoring in chemical engineering)

Re:1600x1200 !! nice..

[SoSueMe]

I want to be a beta tester ;)

Use any Microsoft product.

Couldn't resist.

Power Consumption?

[LionMage]

The Samsung press release states:

It will consume no more power than a 15" display and be a third of the thickness of existing LCD models, the company said.

But what kind of a 15" display are they comparing against? A 15" LCD display? Hopefully they're not comparing against a 15" CRT display!

Ideally, OLED displays should be significantly less power-hungry than LCD displays by virtue of not requiring a backlight.

Personally, I'm looking forward to bypassing the LCD and plasma "revolution," and going straight from CRT to OLED technology for the displays in my home. Considering the heat put out by plasma televisions, and the fact that I live in the middle of Phoenix, Arizona, my air conditioning system will thank me for the transition. And it'll be nice to have a display with a small desktop footprint for my G5 which is also adequate for gaming (and if the color gamut is good, it'll be adequate for Photoshop work too).

Actually...

[Junta]

I have a 15" laptop at 1600x1200, and it is great. The key is that X is configured to know the DPI and the fonts are rendered with much more definition (crisper lines, smoother curves).

3D games are another area where high resolution can lead to a smoother experience, so long as the game has little raster-font content.

Combine this with a more and more vector based interface, and you get a lot more flexibility. High resolution small displays no longer have to mean unreadable, they can mean much higher quality text and graphics.

Additionally, I can work with large numbers of windows or large spreadsheets and such by scaling fonts back down and still be able to work with it, albeit it less comfortably. It just feels right.

I also have a 21.4" flatpanel on my desk at 1600x1200, and for the most part the fonts are no larger, just more content can fit because of the DPI awareness (though non-vector images are much more bearable on that screen, but I actually see fewer and fewer things that matter in that format that have so much detail that it matters).

Display with no edge trim?

[j1m 5n0w]

I'd be interested in panel displays with no trim on the side so they could be placed adjacent to each other for a larger screen. Does anyone know if that's possible with current technology, or if anyone makes that now? (Okay, okay, what I really want is something I can roll up like a poster, but I don't expect that to happen any time soon.)

-jim

Re:Sorry to nitpick...

[gosh_d]

Conventional LED's used as a screen (think Times Square) do not comprise an OLED monitor. The "O" is for "organic," whereby organic inks are made to produce their own light. An LED uses a completely different phenomenon.

laptop market yes, desktop market no

[SuperBanana]

That's funny, because there's a 1600x1200 15" panel perched on my lap right now.

And there's a 1440x960 17" on mine. Aside from the laptop market, it is extremely difficult to find anything other than the following size/resolution combos:

• 15 inch 1024x768
• 17 inch 1280x1024
• 19 inch 1600x1200

LCD panels have been out for years but this has remained a near constant, while the laptop industry has seen pixel densities skyrocket, with zero crossover to the desktop market.

Re:laptop market yes, desktop market no

[thogard]

This stupdity is a result of a limited number of chips that decode a normal analog VGA signal and recreate a digital one. The laptops don't do that so they just use a pure digital signal all the way to the LCD pannel. Your desktop LCD has all sorts of nastyness in it so you can plug it into a 640x480 VGA connector and still have it work.

It's the pixel alignment you have to watch out for

[lingqi]

Since I saw the announcement on TV last night, being in japan and all, i figure i can add some comments from the footage of the actual thing.

the 40" screen is damn thin. i mean, it must have been maybe 2cm. it was amazingly sexy in that regard.

however, upon closer inspection of the screen (the camera-crew took the pains to zoom in onto the screen), there are alignment issues between pixel blocks of the screen and there are dead pixels. What i am guessing is that to get the 40" they created blocks of pixels at a time, and at the edges there are visible chasms maybe 30% pixel width.

I am not sure about the dead pixel.

anyway it's impressive but the immaturity of the technology really shows.

Re:Sorry to nitpick...

[Jeremy Erwin]

It cost over $6 million that SHOULD have gone to scholarships.
Coach said he had enough scholarships for the third string squad.

Using OLED display now

[ctrif]

I'm using an OLED display now on my Kodak LS633 camera

The display is amazing. The camera turns heads as people ask about the large bright screen and the vibrant colours. I can hold it at virtually any angle or up high over a crowd and still see what I'm shooting.

I don't understand why Kodak doesn't release more cameras with the same display. I think the LS633 was only available in Australia?

Can't wait for TV size screens :)

yes, you can game with it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Response time for a typical OLED pixel is... get this... 10 microseconds. That's right; microseconds. Compare that to 12 milliseconds for my (very expensive) TFT monitor.... yeah, you can play games with it ^_^

Actually, no...

[Svartalf]

The lifetime is actually on a par with most of the average CCFL tube backlights (10-15k hours with some of the premium ones going for up to 30k hours...).

So... If you run your LCD monitor without blanking, etc., you can expect the thing to start fading somewhere after about 10 or so months and dead sometime in the first quarter of the next year- just like OLEDs.

Color lifetimes not as big a problem...

[Svartalf]

...as you'd think.

As others have pointed out, it's BLUE that fades fastest. But, what everyone has missed in this discussion is that CCFL backlight lifespan, the lifetime for the backlighting used by LCD monitors isn't much better than the blue OLED material. Average lifespan for a CCFL tube is something on the order of 10-15k hours (uh, the average lifespan for the blue OLED material is 10k hours...) and the premium tubes tend to have about 30k hours of lifespan- and you're not likely to see the premium tubes in most applications.

To put this all in perspective:

(OLEDs)
24 hours in a day.
10k hours of average usable continuous runtime.
416 days of average usable continuous runtime.
1.14 years of average usable continuous runtime.

(CCFL backlit LCDs)
24 hours in a day.
10-15k hours of average usable continuous runtime.
416-625 days of average usable continuous runtime.
1.14-1.71 years of average usable continuous runtime.

The low-end is more likely than the high-end on LCDs based on my personal experience. Without cut-off, etc. your LCD panel will be effectively dying or dead within about 12-14 months, just like an OLED display panel. If the cost of an OLED display is dirt cheap, which one do you think will win out.