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40" OLED Television Revealed at SID
deglr6328 writes "Seiko Epson has unveiled a massive 40 inch OLED display prototype at this years Society for Information Display (SID) symposium in Seattle. The display was printed on to a backplane containing the drive electronics with a specialized inkjet process using Phillip's PolyLED technology. Samsung and Phillips also showed large scale OLEDs they say can also be scaled up to 'television sizes.'"
That the Epson display is not a single display at all (in that it isn't printed in one process), but a combination of smaller ones, more along the sizes of the Philips and Samsung ones.
I have seen the Philips display and I have to say the quality was good, there is slight horizontal banding where runs of the print head touch, but that's something that can be ironed out. Not quite up to consumer TV standards, maybe, but certainly showing promise.
Yeah, they're using OLEDs on small devices, but not ones with long service lives (generally). While they do attempt to encase the OLEDs, they don't know how long they'll last since they're unstable in oxygen using the current technology. Using them in cell phones and digital cameras is good because the expectation is that one doesn't keep the things for long.
But if you're buying an LCD for your computer or as a television, you want it to last more than a few years without degrading.
Presently here, but not there.
"who wants to spend a grand on a TV that is gonna look bad in a couple of years." You're an optimist. With today's OLED technology it will look bad in mere months. These things make plasma TVs seem like they were built to last a lifetime, by comparison. Last I've heard, OLEDs are rated for something like 1000 hours life. At, say, 8 hours a day use, that's 4 months. (And 8h per day is already less than you'll have it in use when it gets shared between you, your SO and maybe a kid using it for the game console.) But that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that the brightness doesn't even decrease uniformly across the whole spectrum. Each of the 3 colour components has its own decay time. So it probably will take less than 4 months before the image starts to get a bit of a wrong hue. I don't know about you, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to image quality. I'm one of those nuts who bought a 9800 XT just to be able to play with 6x FSAA and 16x Aniso, and are already waiting for the X800 XT for the same reason. So something which is pretty much guaranteed to slowly go the wrong hue, I just don't need it. Not as a computer monitor, and not as a TV. Even if it was for free.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This is pretty good. That's enough to do 720p HDTV, the second highest resolution. I mean the highest resolution worth having on a TV is 1920x1080, that's the max HDTV goes.
You also have to remember that bigger costs money as does higher res, and they are independant problems to deal with. That's why a 22" multi-sync computer monitor that does 2048x1536 costs more than a 36" NTSC TV with a tuner, PIP, etc. The NTSC TV onyl has to pull 720x480, makes it cheaper to produce at a given size.
I expect OLED displays will go the same as any other. You'll be able to get desk sized displays that meet or exceed the resolution of 60" displays. The reason is simple: Computer displays are used up close for precision work, and people will drop $500+ to have a high resolution one. Large displays are susually used for entertainment, and there's just a limit to how much resolution is worth the money. After all, a display that does 4000+ pixels across does you no good if you are driving it with an HDTV signal that is less than half that.
Probably 2 things:
1. People want to buy them at that price
2. They are more expensive to produce than CRTs.
The picture ain't that good either. The geometry is better than a badly-aligned CRT (standard in consumer TV sets, even of $2000!), but the color quality is much, much worse. The responsetime is usually not good either, and while the viewing angle is getting bette, there usually is a blue or green background color when looking at a large angle.
I am looking around for a new TV set. I checked some different makes of CRT TVs and it amazes me how bad the geometry is on 2000 Euro TV sets, when compared to 200 Euro computer monitors. And it usually is not even customer-settable! Every computer monitor has these 5 buttons that allow you to align many things using an onscreen menu, but on TV sets this is hidden in a service menu that is only accessible when you know the secret code.
When I was still at uni, studying numbercrunching, one of the thing the department (phys. chem.) was working on was trying to extend the lifespan of the blue colour OLED, and to invent a white one (the holy grail as it were), research sponsored by the EU I think. The best they had lasted mere months, whereas red and monochrome (yellowish iirc) lasted pretty much indefinitely.
I think the lifetime is more around 10,000 hours. In one of the recent /. discussions relating to OLEDs there was a discussion about this, can't seem to find it though. This article does mention 10,000 hours, and so does this very interesting OLED Technology Roadmap (PDF). It actually says about the performance targets that by 2004, the lifetime for 300 cd/m^2 should be about 10k hours, while for 2007 and 2010, the aim is 20k and respectively 40k hours. Note: I just skimmed that document, but it should be an interesting read...
Sorry, but completely wrong.
= /library/en-us/dnwmt/html/yuvformats.asp
MPEG compression uses YUV color space, not RGB. Y is the luminance/intensity and uses 8 bit per pixel. U and V specify the color tone and use 8 bit each, but for groups of 4 pixels. So 4 pixels need (4*8)+8+8=48 bits, 12 per pixel. (This is useful because the human eye's has more luminance receptors than color receptors).
In this YUV model, every pixel can have one out of 2^24 colors, because it has its own intensity, it just needs to have the same color tone as the other 3 neighbours. To reproduce the colors on a RGB screen you need 24 bits per pixel, because you can't use the intensity trick with RGB.
See also http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
"Last I've heard, OLEDs are rated for something like 1000 hours life."
That was a typo. The real number was 10,000 hours, and this is the time the blue component of an OLED display lasts before fading. The green and red components last about 20,000-30,000 hours. There is still a lot of improvement to be made in stabilizing the organic componenents of OLEDs, so expect those numbers to improve over time.
Also, don't forget that an LCD display last also about 10,000-15,000 hours, after which the backlight has to be replaced (usually about as, if not more expensive than buying a new display). CRTs don't last forever, either. After about 20,000 hours the brightness of a CRT will gradually degrade.
Considering that OLED is a relatively new technology it would be quite foolish to label it as being impractical/useless, since there is still a lot of room for improvement (we're looking at prototypes here!).
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
They've still got development to do. 260,000 colours aren't enough!
They will do 24 bits in no time and you will see them in laptops PDA's cameras and cell phones sooner than you think.
for more info on LEP/OLED displays try these...
Universal display
cambridge display tech
high efficency
transparent
flexible
stacked hi res
and some apps...
# Low-power, bright, colorful cell phones
# Full color, high-resolution, personal communicators
# Wrist-mounted, featherweight, rugged PDAs
# Wearable, form-fitting, electronic displays
# Full-color, high resolution, portable Internet devices and palm size computers
# High-contrast automotive instrument and windshield displays
# Heads-up instrumentation for aircraft and automobiles
# Automobile light systems without bulbs
# Flexible, lightweight, thin, durable, and highly efficient laptop screens
# Roll-up, electronic, daily-refreshable newspaper
# Ultra-lightweight, wall-size television monitor
# Office windows, walls and partitions that double as computer screens
# Color-changing lighting panels and light walls for home and office
# Low-cost organic lasers
# Computer-controlled, electronic shelf pricing for supermarkets and retail stores
# Smart goggles/helmets for scuba divers, motorcycle riders
# Medical test equipment
# Wide area, full-motion video camcorders
# Global positioning systems (GPS)
# Integrated computer displaying eyewear
# Rugged military portable communication devices
My favorite is the high efficency ceiling mount. Need white light [click] there you are. Want a change of pace go for blue sky with puffy white coulds [click] done.
These products are supposed to be cheap enough to do these things once mass production has begun.