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OLED Displays Technology Primer and Forecasting
HawKe writes "OLEDs are back in the news and Audioholics reports on what makes the technology so special as well as who leads the pack in currently shipping products, vaporware, and displays that are on the horizon. The crux of the matter is whether or not OLEDs, the "eco-friendly" choice, can outpace current LCD and plasma display advances. In order to enter and dominate the home theater and computer display markets, they must not only establish themselves, but also beat the leaders in price and performance."
But I'm going to wait until production drives the costs down.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Finally a new type of display to use. Normal CRT monitors and TVs screen burn, while being really bulky, lcds have shadow effects and can be damaged REALLY easily sometimes, and plasma displays screen burn easiest. I wonder how this will compare to the rest of the other displays we, as consumers, have used for quite some time!
By principle these are going to be very costly and difficult to manufacture, I really don't see the price going down very soon. That being said, this is a very promising technology, and it may just be what is needed to get people (like me) to switch from CRTs (once the price goes down, of course)
Props to GNAA!
What I really want is some solid data on how much of an improvemnet it has on battery life. All this jargen about oled's makes me fell old.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
I own one of the Pioneer decks they reference in the article. Its display is positively stunning, though I wish I'd waited a couple years for the color ones that can play MPEG off of the CD. Mmm.
In the article, though, they list among OLED's advantages "1000 hour life."
That's 41 and two-thirds days. This is clearly wrong; my stereo's been going strong for nearly two years.
Just FYI.
If so, what is the MTBF (mean time before failure, right term here?)
or what is the lifetime of such a LED device?
Imagine your display goes fuzzy and blurred in the middle of a good film.
Hey, that's my password you are typing
One big advantage of plastic electronics is that there is virtually no restriction on size.
Women: "Damn right."
My big gripe with standard LCD displays is the complete inability to truly display black. This leads to a pretty crummy contrast ratio relative to conventional displays and good plasma displas. LCDs are getting better, but OLED might just be what we need. The article desribes it as self-illimunating, though, so I don't see why it can't display true-black, since there's no backlight, but for a technical article, it sure is weak on the details.
Some of the challenges OLEDs have to face:
* Ensuring competitive refresh rates, contrast ratios, black levels and overall performance
Why on earth would black levels be an issue for an LED display? I thought that was a problem unique to LCDs, due to their backlighting. Furthermore, I was under the impression that refresh rates for today's LED displays already surpass LCDs; that high refresh rates are a feature of the technology. Is the reporter full of it, or am I misunderstanding something?
Given a 40 hour work-week, 1 month is 160 hours, and 6 months is 960 hours. This sounds ridiculous! I'm in the third year of my CRT monitor, and I don't have the money to replace it anytime soon, esp. not if I have to buy a new OLED every six months!
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-- Pablo Picasso
I'd like to see how they're dealing with washout -- the article says they don't washout in sunlight like LCD does... I beg to differ. My Motorola cell phone has an OLED display, and it is completely unviewable in the sun. Hopefully the technology has improved.
Normally, when I see things about operating lifetimes exceeding some number, it means that they normally fail around that point. This means that at continuous use, the OLED would fail after 42 days. Let's say that it's in an computer monitor and is on for 8 hours a day. That means it's expected to last 125 days. I for one do not want to replace my monitor three times a year. If this technology is to get widespread acceptance, it's going to need an operational lifetime much greater than that.
They must not only establish themselves, but also beat the leaders in price and performance.
This sentence seems to assume some sort of independant startup...some sort of 'competition' - which isn't the case at all.
Seeing as the leading LCD manufacturers (displays, not panels) have been aware of this evolution, and they have the reins in their hands, OLED can come in quickly - no worries.
An old article on OLED's in Scientific American made me a huge fan years ago... the potential for these things is amazing. Because the base is a polymer, which can be transparent, all sorts of sci-fi style possibilities open up, laptop screens that can be rolled up are just the beginning... HUDs in cars could become standard offering by sticking an OLED screen on the windscreen... office windows coated with an OLED screen would look like normal windows but could double as a TV or computer screen at the flick of a switch.... same for home TVs. Because pixels can be transparent, the RGB layers of a display can be sandwiched on top of each other, meaning that an OLED display will have individual pixels which have their own unique colour- as opposed to current technologies where RGB pixels are arrayed next to each other and rely on the eye to merge separate red, green and blue dots into a "colour". For this reason, OLED displays should be significantly sharper. Yes, a window that doubles as a TV is a long way off but the articles show that the technology isn't just science fiction... it's getting closer every day. One day we'll have windows with DVI inputs :)
Putting syrup in coffee is some form of blasphemy.
This press release doesn't really have much new information in it. OLEDs have been around for several years now. And the article talks about printing the monitor on the same glass as a current LCD monitor. One of the real potential benefits of OLED is the ability to print them on a flexible plastic film. Check out this Scientific American article from back in February.
Plasma tvs have about 20,000 hours life. Something to think about when you buy an open box plasma tv from bestbuy or circuit city since its probably been on 14+ hours a day for 6 months or longer. So you'll get about 5 years of life out of it, instead of 10 to 14 years with a new one. I'm amazed that plasma tvs are so common now a days, I see them used as billboards at theaters and malls. These things are on 24 hours a day that means 2 years later they'll need to be replaced.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Is this new OLED Technology good, or is it whack?
Read journal when you are not understand
Instead of continually advancing the 2D display devices, why don't we work on 3D. I'm holding out for a hologram projector! I'm sure someone is working on it.
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If they end up being somewhat cheaper or make up for it in other ways, that may not be a problem. After all, replacing laptops and screens every two years isn't such a big deal given how fast the electronics around them evolve anyway.
LCD life is 45,000 hours
That's really just due to the fact that eventually the CCFT backlight will croak. With most LCD displays, it's just a $15-$25 part and your LCD is back in business. If you factor in CCFT replacement, an LCD monitor should last as long as the controller circuitry keeps functioning - most likely, a LONG ASS TIME.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
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.
I am glad that OLED's are making their way into the market now, but, as my stance is with all technology, I will wait until it matures to be cheaper, last longer, and overall, be better. Remember Wi-Fi when it first came out? Ugh, dreadful. But now, it's a very mature technology that performs great for most people's needs. I have the same opinion on what will happen to OLED's. This has great potential, it just won't be seeing any of my hard-earned dollars until it proves its worth. ~1000 hours isn't worth it to me as of yet.
b) lifecycle numbers are under bias. FWIW many electrolytic capacitors are also rated for 1000 hr lifecycles, and you don't see many tv sets just blowing up after 6 months. "Lifetime" typically means "this much time until specifications change X%." For capacitors it's typically a 20% change in value, and this change is not linear - the greatest change comes in the first 100 hrs or so and degrades slower after that.
Given "normal" program material and use in a true color display "1000 hrs" absolutely does NOT mean "it dies in 40 days." It means after 1000 hrs under bias any given pixel element will lose 50% of its brightness. In a 1/64 duty cycle system this means you can multiply those 40 days by 64 - about 2500 days, or 7 years.
As someone else has pointed out, the real challenge is getting a reliable means of producing panels with consistent degradation of all pixels over time. If you have 10% of the red oleds fading after 800 hrs and 20% of the green elements fading after 1200 hrs you're going to have a display with splotches of color that, over years, becomes worse and worse.
Still, this is no worse than LCDs that typically require repair after just a couple of years because their backlight (or the inverter driving it) has failed. At best you can hope for a warning as the color gradually turns pink - or maybe you just turn it on one day and find the screen is "dead." Or your projection set - those bulbs are often a couple hundred bucks, and damn few are rated at more than 2000 hrs lifetime. Given all that, this 1000hrs don't seem bad at all.
I am sick of this FUD. Please, if you are going to post things about plasmas, at least be accurate. Of the larger plasma makers, most like Panasonic or Pioneer are currently at 60,000 hours until phosphor half-brightness, and the majority of the rest are at 30,000. 20,000 hours was right in 2002, when those stats were published, but just as in computers, things move fast. If I were to quote the state of Linux in 2002 as the current state, I am sure I'd get flamed mightily.
Sorry if I came out as mad at you, I'm not, but there was another post here which claimed 10,000 hours as the current life span, and I just want to set the record straight.
BTW I do not own a plasma, I own a Sony XBR CRT.
Until OLED's can demonstrate very long lifetimes (like at least 25,000 hours) and avoid the screen burn issue that plagues CRT and plasma displays, I don't think they will have substantial market share for widescreen home theater displays.
Already, DLP has become quite popular for large screen home theater monitors, and LCOS may within the next 18 months offer the benefits of DLP but at substantially lower prices! Also, another nice thing about DLP and LCOS widescreen projection TV's is the fact they have surprisingly low weight, like the fact most 50" (diagonal) DLP/LCOS monitors weigh only 80 pounds, which is around the weight of most 32" (diagonal) CRT television sets! Finally, unlike CRT-based rear-projection TV's and plasma displays, DLP/LCOS monitors don't suffer from screen burn problems.
I've been following OLED's progress for years and I'm glad they're finally getting somewhat competitive. It's a cool technology.
For a television, however, there's another really cool technology I'm waiting for to become commercially available (to the consumer: Grating Light Valve based projection TVs.
Red, Green, and Blue diode lasers (RGB) + a Microelectromechanical (MEM) diffraction ribbon = very bright, detailed, lifelike image. I've heard anecdotally about people who became disoriented because the image looked 'too lifelike.'
Informaion about GLV display technology.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
You can have a HUD in your car today by merely fitting a sloping sheet of glass into your line of sight (Hey! Wait a minute!!!!) and projecting onto it. Like a 60 year old gunsight.
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Perhaps they are trying to make the point that these things are so cheap, that after 1000 hours they can just be dismantled and rebuilt - with the same extremely-low cost? Maybe businesses will even be able to buy an OLED recycling machine... If this is the case, a business with too many 15" OLED displays would be able to replace them with fewer, bigger ones :)
If it weren't for fog, the world would run at a really crappy framerate.
Back in about 1952, when TV tubes were much longer front to back and much less strong, supposedly some guy was watching a game on a Dumont TV, and got mad at the way it was going. He either shot out the tube, or threw something at it - I forget which. The implosion that resulted accelerated the electron gun to a high enough velocity that it impaled the guy in the chest and killed him.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
There seems to be a lot of confusion over exactly which type of OLEDs are currently out there in the market.
There are two OLED `generations':
1) Small molecule - these use small organic molecules (think anthracene). They require pretty much conventional vacuum-systems for preparation and hence are expensive. However, they are emissive (unlike LCDs). These are the OLEDs we start to see in cameras etc. Lifetimes are pretty good.
2) Polymer - this is the 2nd gen - here the manufacturing is all roll-to-roll or inkjet printing. These are going to be the el-cheapo reasonably-nice displays of the future. However, the lifetimes here are a concern - we're talking 15,000 hrs for the best blue polymers which isn't good enough yet.
From the linked article:
"Operating lifetime exceed 1000 hours"
I would hope so!
8 hours a day at work, 5 days a week - I would sincerely hope that I wouldn't need to replace my monitor twice a year!
If my white piece of paper emmits no light why doesn't it display true black.
What colour is the 'virgin' screen?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Operating lifetime exceed 1000 hours.
Wow thats a new monitor every 41 days if it's on 24/7. I knew there was a reason for all this technology.
is actually a lure to thieves and car muggers.
Nuff said (and yeah, my Pioneer deck was stolen by some crack junkie)
I'd love to buy a nice LCD screen. Unfortunately, they're all built by the same folks making excellent margins on their CRT lines, so they're far too happy gouging for the "new" LCD technology.
Here in Canada, a half-decent 15" LCD (native 1024x768 resolution) is something like $500 Cdn. You can almost pick up two good 19" monitors (native 1280x1024) for that price.
There's no way it's costing them 2x as much to build a smaller LCD.
We need a new hardware company building only LCD monitors at decent prices. Then, of course, the Big Companies will drop their LCD prices to crush them. Or their VCs will insist on charging exactly the same price as the Big Companies.
Anyone know how you could build your own LCD monitors, and where to buy parts?
- chrish
I'd add that plasma screens are tremendously bright to start with. Most experts will tell you to turn the brightness and contrast way down. As the panel dims you can just increase the brightness controls to compensate.
Rear-projection CRT I don't have any experience with. I hear that yes, burn-in can be a problem with those, probably due to the brightness they need to achieve to project that image onto the screen.
I've been reading a number of online forums that discuss home theater systems and there has been many concerns about screen burn-in problems with CRT-based rear projection TV's, mostly because of the need to have high levels of brightness to achieve a viewable display in the home environment. This is why DLP and LCOS based rear-projection TV's have become popular, mostly because you avoid this very specific issue. Also, unlike CRT-based RPTV's, DLP/LCOS based RPTV's tend to be quite a bit lighter, too; a CRT-based 50" (diagonal) RPTV could weigh over 50 kilograms (not to mention being physically very large!), while a DLP/LCOS based RPTV of the same screen size weighs around 36 kilograms, about the weight of a 32" (diagonal) CRT direct-view TV, not to mention being quite a bit physically smaller.
First, it says:
"# Operating lifetime exceed 1000 hours"
So does that mean that I will have to replace my new cheap OLED TV after 1000 hours? or that my current LCD will only last 1000 hours, or what? Thats a 24x7 lifespan of a shade less than 42 days.
Other than that, seems like a good idea, and lots of good cheap applications as well. And considering how the devices are made, could this be a step below cloth displays, or moving posters, etc??
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call me back when i can buy a OLED monitors, 1 inch holographic memory storage cubes, electronic paper, and Duke Nukem Forever - at Best Buy.
OLEDs are just the latest vaporware (and no, i don't concider 1 fscking digital camera screen anything else but vaporware), and i've been reading the same damn articles about it for at least 5 years now... this is not gawddamned news...
i swear - i hold no hope of seeing a 17" OLED monitor before 2010 when looking at the progression of the technology.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
I think: ... pixels of red, green, and blue material are applied.
... pixels of red, green, and blue emitting material are applied.
was supposed ot be:
Apparently the OLEDs themselves can be made transparent.
moderation just meta-modded unfair
That is what I want, except I need to try these out. I know several people who get severe headaches from laptops and LCD monitors. I have stuck with CRTs because I want the high (at least 85hz) refresh at 1024x768 and at least 80hz at 1280x1024. 70hz gives me headaches after an hour. Can someone please report on the experience of using an OLED monitor for extended (>10 hours) period?
Now I just need to find a 40" touchscreen.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.