Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Except the worst pain about OLEDs nowadays is that they burn out (or more like diffuse and get blurry) way faster than anything else - that's the barrier that keeps them from entering the market.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
RTFA. The article's main point is that OLED manufacturing processes, once some of the technological hurdles are overcome, is far, far cheaper than TFT or plasma. The contender for assembly methodology is to use an inkjet-like system to print the OLED polymers onto the substrate and use common metal sputtering techniques for the interconnects. They even mentioned that a key price advantage is the ability to integrate driving circuitry onto the same substrate as the display, saving the cost of having to use off-screen drivers (this is also being used in newer CG-TFT displays).
Brighter than? LCDs have no brightness, its all from a backlight. OLEDs emit light, thats why you can have paper thin OLEDs.. and without the viewing angle problems caused by backlights and their distance from the screen and how they emit light
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?
For the same reason that self-illuminating plasma displays have a weak black level: the amount of light they can put behind those colors. The darker the glass is, the brighter a color has to be to penetrate that black and still look decent, hence the reason a lot of plasmas have a "smoke" black. OLEDs will need to be much brighter to penetrate a true black, and balancing that brightness with MTBF will indeed be a challenge.
Of coursre, all other things being equal, I'll be perfectly happy to forego the heavy power usage of LCDs and the ludicrous power usage of plasma displays.
LCD life is 45,000 hours
Plasma life is 14,000 hours
CRT life is 45,000 hours
I'll stick with LCD or CRT until plasma or OLED become cheap enough that replacing them is like replacing the brake pads on your car.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Yes, you're absolutely right. Since the pixels in OLED are light-emitting they can display true black by simply turning off -- just light in a CRT display. The reason LCD can't display true black is because they have to block the backlight to render black, and they're just not 100% light blocking...
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.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
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.
It isn't just a manufacturing hurdle. IMO, The articles (er, press releases) completely ignores the most significant drawback: that the different colors fade at different speeds.
I was about to contradict you...until I googled and saw This
My Favourite Meme
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.