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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."
One big advantage of plastic electronics is that there is virtually no restriction on size.
Women: "Damn right."
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.
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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).
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.
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
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.
I've got to wonder if that's a typo. The last time I read something about OLED lifetime it was lamenting that blue only had a 10,000 hour half-life as opposed to 20,000 hours for red -- and that claim was probably from a pdf found on some university's faculty home pages.
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.