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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."
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!
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.
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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.
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).
I believe there are also some major environmental displosal issues to contend with, besides the actually technical issues. Something about the inking process (for the inkjet like system.) is relatively bad at the moment.
Give that part about three more years. Physics guys upstairs are actually working on a similar problem now with some deposition machines.
As you mention, the main selling point will be for integration with other circuits. This is really the next step to making wearable advertising.
-=fshalor
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?
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
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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Imagine if you needed a new monitor. So you go out and buy a new OLED display. After use it eventually starts to fail (after your 42 day marathon CS session, or your 2 years of only checking your e-mail, or whatever). Instead of going out and buying a whole new display ($$$), you don't.
You open a little panel on the top (or side) of the screen and pull out the OLED pannel not unlike pulling a film plate out of a camera. You go down to the local computer store and buy a new OLED pannel (not display) for a little bit of money ($), stick it in your display, and you're all set.
Now because they cost less to manufacture, they cost less at the start, and the "refills" are cheap (unlike LCD panels which cost a fortune). Now only that, but because electronics can be integrated onto the panel, the new one you buy might all of a sudden offer you a higher refresh rate, more colors, higher resolution, lower power consumption, or some other feature that has been cooked up or improved since you bought your panel.
I would buy that. It seems perfectly reasonable to me. By leaving things in the case of the display (power supply, connectors, speakers, USB hubs, anything else you want to put in there; maybe driver circuitry) when you buy a new panel to put in your display things are cheap. When your LCD or CRT dies, you not only have to buy a new tube, you have to re-buy all the electronics around it because you can't (easily) get a new tube to fix your monitor. Same with LCDs. So in the long run it would be cheaper. Instead of paying $300 every 3 or 4 years (let's just assume that), you pay $150, then $25 every year. Eight years out you've spent $325 ($25 * 7 + $150), instead of the $600 you'd spend normally. The difference is that each year you get little incremental upgrades. And if the displays are even cheaper than that (maybe $100 to start, or the "refills" are $15) things look even better, don't they.
And if the display manufactures got together and set a standard for how the panels interface to the display and such so they all took the same refills, the competition would be FANTASTIC for the consumer in price and quantity. And before you say "they won't do that, just like printer ink doesn't do that", don't forget that a company like Dell (or Dell + others) could force it on them. If that happened, it would be such a great day for the consumer.
It could work. Maybe things will go my way (we'll see), or maybe the things will be improved in lifespan to where it's like a normal LCD. Either way it's competition for LCDs which means that consumers can benefit even if they never replace LCDs totally.
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And how long do you think it will take them to jack the price of the "refills" sky-high...
You know, like printer ink and razor blade cartridges?
Lets not give the megacorps yet another "disposable" item they can soak us for... besides, wouldn't it suck if your monitor suddenly "died" at 7pm on a Saturday night or something. Good luck finding a "refill" for it.
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'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.
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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.
OLED panels don't just suddenly "die" (unless an electronics defect occurs). They'll probably get gradually darker, and the color balance will start to be off.
You'll have plenty of warning before having to buy a "refill".
I like the idea, but you may be right about the price thing.
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