Slashdot Mirror
No Sony OLED Displays In 2004
Anonymous Howard writes "Designtechnica is reporting that Sony will not introduce any OLED displays in 2004 as previously anticipated. Sony was planning on producing 300,000 2-inch OLED panels per month for its portable devices such as DSCs (digital still cameras) and PDAs. Surprisingly, there have only been a handful of products out that use OLED displays; Samsung has a cell phone and MSI has an MP3 player, for example."
the panels still have a shorter life span than TFT LCD panels
and my guess is, they rushed their mass production announcement before doing the QA for full PR effect, and the stress-tests showed the shorter life span to be quite dramatically shorter than expected.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Such as MSI's MP3 Player and Samsung's Cell Phone.
/. my .sig :)
Come on folks- this is the internet.
On a side note- I dare you to
All of Kodak's digital cameras are using OLED screens. They're probably the biggest shipper of OLED screens right now, but people always forget about them.
Well take a look at one of their screens, and you won't forget. They're GORGEOUS!
On a related note, in its 2004 MiniDV camcorders of the HC-XX series Sony claims to use a "Hybrid LCD display" which is claimed to perform significantly better than the regular LCD screens it renders obsolete (like the one in my 2003 MiniDV). I tried to find out what Hybrid meant and failed - what is the big secret I wonder...
See that long UID - that's what you get for lurking too long
You're right about the lessened life compared to LCDs, but you're wrong about the production cost. OLEDs are cheaper to produce than LCDs, this is a known fact.
:)
There is also many other advantages compared to LCDs; Organic light emitting diodes are self-emitting and don't require a backlight, they're brighter and require less power than LCD displays. They can also be read from a much wider viewing angle than LCDs, and they can even be made on plastic instead of glass.
I sure enjoy the OLED display on my mobile phone
- A lazy AC
... Because of vested interests.
;D)
OLED holds many promises because it is, as the name indicates, a LED type of display. In other words, you don't block/filter an underlying lightsource like with LCD-type screens. Every pixel itself emits light. This makes for better image quality at higher resolution and less power consumption plus, as a bonus, no vulnerable, ill-distrubuted central light-source.
Once (if?) the optimal solution is found to creating the seperate Organic colors reliably (and currently the biggest problem: durably) OLED should overtake all other techniques. Especially since some production techniques currently being pioneered do not have an inherent limitation to the substrate size (read: Mega sized displayes at Giga resolutions, ultraflat, high light-output and low power...).
I say should because LCD is currently the entrenched technique and I don't think all investments have been recoverd yet. The question then becomes: is the best (cheapest to produce) OLED solution being brought forward by a current player with LCD 'capital' to defend or an outsider? If the latter, OLED has a fighting chance, if the former, we'll have to see if several producers have competing designs to make OLED still take off. A lot of money has gone into those factories, and even if they are relatively easily converted to OLED, most companies don't jump for joy at the prospect of destroying existing investments for a newer technology. (Or any new investments for that matter
Recouping costs may hold OLED back more than any technological hurdle, I'm sorry to say.
Karma? What's that again?
Many of LG's cell phones use the same OLED display. The VX6000, VX5550 the LG 4600 (Telus) and a ton of them in Korean markets. Also Samsungs E715, the upcomming i550 use OLEDs for the outer displays. If you've seen an OLED display you know how attractive and sharp they look, its quite different from an LCD. They also have a very nice expanded viewing angle. Hopefully late this year and next year there will be phones with full color OLEDs as displays.
OLED displays can also support much higher (than LCD) refresh rates. Because there is no backlight, when a pixel is black it it really black so the contrast is also much higher.
30 years if of course too much, LCDs dont last that long and about 5 years should be good enough. Keep in mind that they do not die the day they turn 5 y.o., they just lose some of the brightness/contrast.
naeem
In electronics there is no such interest. The market for displaying things is huge. More and more things around the house have displays and who ever can make the cheapest/nicest can have a significant advantage.
But for now LCD is not yet dead. The screen size of oled is still low (sure it is going up but so is lcd). What you are suggesting is that the CRT was holding back the LCD. Or the tv industry the computer screen or the paper/dotmatrix industry the tv-screen industry.
Just because sony is having troubles doesn't mean oled isn't happening. As others have pointed out there are plenty of devices out there. I remember when camera's came with CRT viewers instead of the new fangled LCD. Nothing stopped the LCD except the tech and nothing will stop OLED except the tech. To many players who would love to get the holy grail of a cheap clear brilliant display.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The OLED panels I've played with have all been far lower power than an LCD with the backlight turned on, but that's not a fair comparison for some products. For example, MP3 players can get away with turning the backlight off in many cases. An LCD with the backlight turned off takes almost no power. This "idle" state was hard to do with the OLEDs I've used because they were PWM driven, and below a certain brightness they'd get flickery. At the lowest acceptable brightness, they were using about 100 times the power an idle LCD did.
But OLED is still lower power for devices which are useless with the backlight turned off (like cameras, portable TV/DVD players etc). I wouldn't be surprised if next generation panels come down enough in power requirement that the difference isn't important.