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Sony Begins OLED Mass Production
Dodger73 writes "According to their press release at sony.net, Sony beings mass production of full color OLED displays at 3.8" size for their Clie PEG-VZ90 'Personal Entertainment Handheld.' The press release claims, that their 'Super Top Emission' technology reaches 150cd/m^2; at the familiar 1000:1 contrast ratio.
Not quite the 19" display I'd like for my computer at home, but definitely a step in the right direction."
OLED = Organic Light-Emitting Diode
Its not the size that matters, its how you use it... I will be very happy to have my 3.8"
#include sig.h
So now we have Organic LED's and Organic speakers.... perhaps one day we will have an organic computer! :-)
As OLED works with self-luminous organic materials, it has outstanding response time, without producing any afterimage even when displaying moving images (movies). Also with wide viewing angle and contrast ratio as high as 1000:1, high quality images can be realized on mobile products which are used in various occasions.
As the saying goes, mother nature knows best. With all our technical skills, nature can produce a better light emitting substance than we can!
This is super sexy, I cannot wait until I have a paper thin wall sized display...
Good work sony.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Just don't use any anti-bacterial soap before handling it! ::swish::
Opto Tech introduces 1.5-inch OLED panel for handsets
"The company said that the panel has the highest resolution among all current OLED panels"
Perhaps OLEDs will lead to 300dpi displays, or at least 160dpi. ~72 just don't cut it.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
You can get a whole bunch and put them together as was talked about in yesterday's article.
gShares.net
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artlu.net
The story did not say anything on power consumption for the Sony OLEDs. I would hope, since PDA/Cell battery life is fairly low right now, that this OLED consumes far less than its backlit counterpart.
Otherwise, the sharper contrast/light quality is nice, but no thank you.
One step closer to everything we've been promised the past few years. You want a roll-up screen to go with your fold-up keyboard? This is the technology line that will make it happen. Window curtains that can change color, table-tops that are skinnable...think of it.
Now if we can only get the price down enough to make such trivial applications a reality.
Sony Beings?
Phil
I like to read about this geek stuff. Understanding the technology is important to me. However, I am most curious about how the technology is applied. What software applications will be better for people now? How does this impact the elderly users? How will the usability be improved overall? The technology is great, but I like to understand the business benefits and the user benefits.
How to Download YouTube Videos
should be quite a bit lower than lcds. The diods are far less efficient than the lcd backlights, BUT:
-You dont need polarizers and color filters (those absorb >2/3 of the light in a lcd)
-Dark pixels are just not powered/lower powered (if the typical brightness level is low, this is another factor of 2-4).
So the organic leds only need 10% of the effience of normal ones to break even, which should be very archiveable.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I wonder if this is going to change their policy in regards to selling Clie's in the US?
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Has any progress been made regarding the life of these displays? Last I heard, the longest these things would last was about a year or two before going too dim to be useful.
Unless Sony is figuring that the early adopters will be people who tend to buy new PDA's quite frequently anyway, and will therefore be willing to get rid of this one once the next generation comes out the following year...
Will these end up in Sony's PSP? Would be nice...
"This is your life, and it's ending one second at a time."
This is going to make Sony a bundle...
...Sony releases the Clie VZ90. To bad it's for Japan only, as Sony has decided to pull out of USA and Europe when comes to PDAs.
TC - My Photos..
Dunno. My Glofish might like it. I only got females. And that's like that dinosaur island movie. These females must be mighty desperate and find these cells in my game pad to be male-looking. Don't want to start them mutating or something.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
For one of their Cameras awhile back? Whatever happened to that? And why wasn't it ever realeased in the US?
:)
I'm glad to see Sony utilizing this technology. Now I just have to wait for the eventual OLED gameboy
There is no spork.
I was going to bring this point up myself. What difference does it make what they put in them, if you can't buy them? They are not for sale in the US. Sony says they will address sales in the US again next year, but I don't see any reason why they would change their stance. Don't be counting on bein able to pick one of these babies up on US soil, ever.
Seems I've been hearing about this technology for years. Does anyone know what Technical road blocks may have been keeping it from entering full blown industrial production for so long? Or maybe this is just the normal gestation period of a new technology?
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
They keep saying they have excellent respone time, but how fast is it? To quote TFA: "As OLED works with self-luminous organic materials, it has outstanding response time, without producing any afterimage even when displaying moving images (movies)." I think LCD screens make the same claims, although they actually can and do leave afterimages a lot of the time, making fast moving games, like first person shooters, very difficult to enjoy.
Gotta get me one of these!
Keep in mind this will only ever apply to the new Japenese models since American Clie is dead.
michael greene
Super top emission? Sounds great. Maybe NVidia will add super-duper-mega-fast graphics technology to their next video cards.
Must be 5 years ago now for a project I was working on way back then, I got hold of a 12.1 inch 800 x 600 native Sharp industrial grade TFT (for those of you not in the know indusrial grade are the pick of the yield) which the had the standard sharp backlight, which was about 300 cd/m2 even way back then, removed and replaced with one from an american company called Landmark Technology which meant it was 1500 candela and true daylight readable even in direct sunlight... the screen was driven by an expensive (I forget the make for the moment) graphics engine which took the input RGB and converted it to the TFT native electronics signal format.
The image quality was absolutely astonishing, even blew away things like my current 21 inch sony 520, white WAS absolutely white, the most minute details such as the - - - - - - effects you get around selected dialogue buttons in windows were absolutely pin sharp, and when showing images such as some of the nature type pictures included in xp as default desktop backgrounds the effect can only be described as feeling like you were looking at a high quality photographic transparency backlit by a professional grade light-box.
The horizontal and vertical viewing angles were also pretty dramatic, with a very wide range over which brightness and contrast didn't appear to vary, response was also more than enough for multimedia playback.
So that was 5 years ago.
I haven't seen anything since that was actually better quality, except today I could get an 18 inch 1600 x 1200 panel, so these "new" ideas are cool and all, but I think their unique selling points must be anything other than true image quality, it must be something like very low power consumption, very much more robust, or perhaps extended operational temperature range.
Until one of those uses applies to me I'm quite happy to use the tft built into my dell laptop, but for desktop work it has to be CRT, for everything else such as the digital camera then the tft screens in built are no more use than thumbnail browaing in MHO.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Wikipedia-link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED Wikipedia states that the main advantage is that (apart from the contrast ratio and the response times) it doesn't need back-lighting and thus has a lower power-consumption. Will this also be true for very large OLED displays? I can imagine that, since every single pixel has to light up by itself, it can be more efficient to use a backlight. Anyone has an idea about the power consumption per pixel for OLEDs and TFT/LCD?
--Use ant to make
What do you think - will the screen be OLED or will that still be too expensive? Can't wait for the PSP - it looks pretty damn cool.
NO real progress has been made in that area. The color failure rate is still pretty high. the typical failure is a pixel getting 'stuck' in the on or off position. Being that the display is more expensive to make than other available technologies, they probably won't be replaceable and will make the units, escentially, throw aways or disposables.
See my other comment for details and supporting links.
I'd like to know at what temperatures those thing still work... They'd come in handy as GPS screens in cars. But cars usually get very cold/hot during the seasons.
Hey, if they came in the right size I'd put them in my KARR (yes the one from Knight Rider) once it's finished.
The main technical problems with pLED (polymer Light Emitting Devices) and OLEDs is that they tend to degrade fairly quickly. The last I heard the best lifetime people have been able to get is approximately 10,000 hours. (lifetime defined as how long it takes before the voltage needed to maintain a steady luminance is double the initial voltage) That being said, progress on the lifetimes (and brightness too) is being made in terms of better materials, better construction, and better design.
/corey
The best part? There are literally hundreds of potential uses for these things in everything from panel lighting, to stickers that are actually bendable displays, to super-cheap mass-producable solar panels. Definately going to turn into some mighty cool tech...
0.01msec = 0.01 * 10^(-3)s = 10^(-5)s... which is to say that you could update a pixel 10^5 = 100.000 per second. Seeing as regular FPSs need to run at around 75 fps I'd say that's plenty fast enough.
As I sit here infront of my four current LCD's... 'crap'
Seriously- I know. I calibrate them.
Of course you need a good probe to know read the CRT- and that means something like the SLS9400, which retailed around 5K at last recall. And you can't ever shut the monitor off, it has to be on ALL the time.
And of course you need a specialized interface for Windows, because windows simply chokes on anything other than 8 bit. Certain cards, like the Dome boards (10 bit BW) are great. Others actually have internal 10 bit ramdacs but don't allow driver access to them. Such a pity.
The underlying subsystem is broken for windows which will limit everyone to 8 bits for years to come.
Never mind that CRT manufactures are calling daily to say they're discontinuing this model, that model... sigh.
(and you need 8 bit to 10 bit internal to avoid banding/quantitizaiton errors after calibrating...)
Millions has been poured into research on making those chemicals in such manners that no way mother nature couldve come up with them.
In fact, she'd have to be as high as a kite to come up with some of the formulations I've seen. And yes, before being laid off I worked on OLED chemicals so I'm fairly knowledgeable about both their manufacture and their design.
Although I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but did you really interpret 'organic' to mean 'natural' ??? Because if you did... well, I'll be nice it's hump day.
LCDs generally don't work with the shutter eyeglasses used to simulate 3-D. Given the fast response rates they give for OLED, does anyone know if there's any reason OLED screens couldn't also be used for 3-D?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Small nitpick, here:
1/60 of a second is not 1 ms. It is 16.666666666666666666666666666666667 ms, or so.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
It's currently available on LCD from IBM. Can't remember the panel cost but it's up there. 200 PPI is about 12 cycles/degree, which isn't very good for detecting stuff.
:P
I've seen OLEDs made to high resolutions in test fabs but the biggest issue is putting the chemicals down- oddly enough they can't figure out how to etch organics as easily as silicon
Any idea what the price of these would be? I am curious because I will be developing a project that may utilize a display.
The big problem with OLEDs is you need some way to make them dark. Really- the ITO substrate is highly reflective, and given the nature of the panel that means your 'off' colour is actually your ambient light level reflected right back at you.
.5ma to 1ma and you can get your 1000:1 but at the cost of lifetime (chemical migration, etc).
:)
Which lowers the effective contrast to about 30:1.
When you add a polarizer, you can get up to about 250:1. Crank the driving current from
So yes, you don't particularly need to 'filter' the light, but some modern OLED designs still do... and since I don't know what I can and can't say I won't say anything
(used to work on them till they laid me off... bastards)
I expect that the life of this display is rather short. Will it be affected by image burn? Can you freeze them? Get them wet? Clean them with household cleaning products? Will they grow?
OLEDs are made by sublimation, currently- earlier ones used a spin coat (easy) to make small panels. New panels are on the order of LCD raw stocks. Since you have to sublime chemicals (which could be as low as 150C to as high as 450C) the 'mask' which prevents the chemical from contacting where it shouldn't usually warps.
:P
Until this problem is solved (or they go to a rotary repeatable drum method) they'll never get the panels much larger then what theyre at.
And yes, making 1 off panels are easy... but it'll cost 30K$
Yeah Kodak introduced an OLED screen on the back of a camera. It was only available overseas (growl) and you couldn't get it here in the states.
I know a few Kodak employees that managed to get one, but they had contacts in Europe management that requested them. God they were great to look at- you could show a full semicircle the photo you just took and EVERYONE could see the image clearly.
I think Kodak was also incorporating them into some pro level gear, but I don't remember much on that.
Because LEDs and OLEDs in particular, grow dim during their worklife. Fluorescent backlight tubes in LCDs do, too, but you can replace them eventually. Here, the pixels are the very source of the light
:-) )
Nevertheless, this is good news, for compared to both CRTs and backlighted LCDs this technology is:
- less power hungry (especially when you use command prompt only, or gothic desktop settings
- inexpensive (much simpler construction, basic material cheaper then silicon),
- hopefully, environment-friendly (more then GaAs LEDs, anyway),
so it can be expected that we will buy new displays because of the new improved resolution, before the wearout shows.
Even CRTs could be revamped (well, sort of "digitized") using this technology: The screen could be an matrix of little OLED displays and electron beam could be used to address the small area of the screen spatially, and carry enaugh current to light one or more pixels, but the information it carries wouldn't be analog luminosity of a single pixel. Instead it would consist of an address of the pixel (or block of pixels) and digitaly encoded information of luminosity(luminosities) and colour(s).
Well, why the fuss with electron beams when we can just make displays without them? The answer would be to avoid too much wiring and decoding circuitry and therefore accomplish better resolution of the display. Even today we have better resolution on top class CRTs than on top class flat panel displays, and now we can further improve it, by making even smaller pixels, lower the radiation (no need for superfast electrons any more), make truly flat screens (geometry becomes virtually nonissue). Second, feeding power and data to screen by CR instead of circuits is IMHO more reliable and production yield should be better.
The Hole Transport Layer is usually the weak link in the OLED device. This material (hah) transports holes, if you like to think of it that way) between the substrate and the luminous amount.
... most companies have differing versions of their HTs, some of them are optimized with their own dopants (funny that).
:(
I believe kodak has HT1 and HT2
Itumitzu (sp?) had some nice ones, but it's been a long while since I've worked on anything like that and the market changes fast. I can't even recall all the big players anymore
Hmm, that's quite correct. That's not really a small nitpick :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
you can get as high as 14 bit colour.
Of course that means you need specialized EVERYTHING for displaying a photo, down to how the image is scanned (high end scanners can do *real* 12 and 14 bit imaging... don't believe that 16bit crap- it's usually 'marketing bits' for the last couple.
So if you have a dedicated viewing system that can display an image appropriately at the bit depth (which is a bit of an oxymoron when you're talking about analog systems) you've got an easy 13 bit display.
And want to know something really interesting about that? The image looks lifelike. As in, you could almost reach in and touch it.
8 bit really sucks.
Nanotube based displays will enable the use of CRT-like technology. But instead of a whole box-sized vacuum tube, we'll have a flat grid (why didn't I think of that?). The advantage is that the voltage requirements will be minimal. Like 20 volts instead of the 200 that today's CRT-based displays require.
;-)
Hey look at that. This article is weekly - i wonder why didn't I submit it as a story in the first place...
Of course, if you have a monitor that can be updated faster, you'll need a faster CPU to process the data.
Seriously, there are advantages for animation and 3D. Faster frame updates can provide higher virtual resolution, as each successive fram matches slightly different edge locations for objects. (That's badly put, sorry.) Higher frame rates can also improve the visual smoothness of rapidly moving objects. If you film a person moving their eyes rapidly, you'll see that they don't move smoothly - they jerk through the motion, stopping every few milliseconds to catch a frame. The higher your frame rate, the more likely your scene is to be "correct" for the eye location at that moment. Intuitively, we've all experienced the jerkiness of movies when things are moving fast. It can be disruptive to the experience.
The advantage of higher frame rates was demonstrated with the first cheap 3D head-mounted display Virtual Reality system (to my knowledge) was built by Dr. Michael McGreevy, at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field near San Jose CA. (See this 1989 paper, this 1993 overview, and McGreevy's 1989 talk.) He used two Citizen 2" handheld TV monitors with only 128x128 resolution, IIRC. Because of the small number of pixels for which to process data, his system was able to update the 3D display data at high frame rates.
He had an interesting and surprising discovery. Our eyes have a small "jitter" - they move back and forth a very small amount, quickly (I don't recall why). He found that his system updated so fast that it altered the display as the eyes jittered. The result was a virtual (perceived) resolution higher than 128x128 would be expected to provide. I think this was in a Scientific American article in about 1988.
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Does anyone know the power consumption of one of these babys? without backlighting it sounds like some better power savings could be had.
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
Since the film is created using organic material, won't it decompose?
I work at a company that develops medical imaging display systems. To make displays uniform and produce correct grayscale images for viewing xrays, etc., there are some strict standards for "gamma" calibrating monitors, referred to as DICOM.
I was at the last SID convention, talking to one of the experts on this stuff from IBM, and I ignorantly commented on how I was looking forward to OLED displays because of the contrast ratio. He explained to me that OLED displays suffer from burn-in worse than any CRT.
Until the recent past, the lifetime of OLED displays has been measured in months. Apparently, what happens is that for each pixel, the junction between the electrodes and the organic diode decays over time (relative to the amount of charge that has gone through it), increasing resistance. At first, this just dims the LED, until the resistance gets so high that you can't meet threshold voltage for the diode, and it stops working entirely.
As I'm sure you can imagine, medical displays can't afford to have any non-uniformity. But given that medical images are non-uniform by nature, non-uniform burn-in will occur, making the xray or MRI image look different, depending on its placement on the screen. The point is that I'm sure you won't appreciate having your monitor suffer non-uniform burn-in, even IF what you're displaying can't affect someone's health.
(The advantage with LCD's is that the liquid crystal doesn't decay, and the only things that do break down are the fluorescent back-lights, and that decay is relatively uniform.)
As I'm sure is the case with everyone else, I look forward to the day when OLED decay is practically non-existant. The problem is that the progress is incredibly slow. LCD's been around for a LONG time, yet it's still far from perfect. OLED will require just as much time to get as good, which means it'll be decades before it catches up. Meanwhile, LCD's will continue to get better.
I read and have heard from multiple sources that Sony has discontinued the whole Clie handheld line. So I don't understand this news........
We get it.
There have been lots of sources for hobbyist LCDs for some time now. They can be purchased in low volume, the interfacing is fairly easy, and the physical mounting is taken care of.
Why haven't OLEDs made it to this market yet? The superior contrast ratio would seem to make them ideal for all sorts of homebrew applications.
Maybe this is Sony's new approach to marketing:
"It's new and fabulous! And You Can't Get it!"
I wouldn't be surprised if companies actually saw this is a plus. Now they can sell you a new one every 1-2 years.
Isn't the contrast ratio on OLED infinite? I was under the impression that since there is no backlight, it's either emitting zero light (as opposed to blocking the light emitted, which isn't 100%) or some light. Wouldn't that be infinite?
Didn't Sony stop to produce the palm os clié handhelds? Or they just build it for the japonese market?
And want to know something really interesting about that? The image looks lifelike. As in, you could almost reach in and touch it.
not a good thing with goatse
Wave upon wave of demented avengers March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream
Perhaps OLEDs will lead to 300dpi displays, or at least 160dpi. ~72 just don't cut it.
The monitor on my notebook (X1000 with 1920x1200, 15.4") is 147 dpi. It didn't cost much more than a typical 1024 or 1280 display.
The only disadvantage is that neither Windows nor linux scales all GUI elements properly. If I make the text the size I like, all my dialog boxes are way too small, the labels don't fit in the buttons, the title bars and widgets in them are too small, etc. Windows and X are both still riddled with assumptions about dpi not being this high.
SED seems to be the darkhorse of the display technologies. It doesn't seem to have as high a public profile as OLED but the tech is very promising. Lower manufacturing costs than LCD or PDP (mainly silkscreen/inkjet processes some lithography), better image quality than LCD (true black, no backlight, CRT like response times), right around the corner for big screen sizes (production to start next year).
http://www.eet.com/sys/news/showArticle.jhtml?arti cleID=47205034
it has the same processor, the same screen resolution, the same wifi, the same lack of bluetooth (even some th55 have bluetooth in Europe), it does not have a camera and is bulkier in size and in PRICE (about $900).
Yes it have more memory, but in my th55 y have a 256 Memory Stick pro so, its not a pro nor a con...
besides this nice OLED display, why would someone spend this kind of money in this unit?
enjoy
NEOCA - Custom LED Flashlights
Last I heard of OLED displays, they were definitely there with the red cells. The green cells were a problem - they lasted long enough that they could go to market with it, but their lifetime was short enough that there'd likely be lots of complaints.
The blue ones, however, had such a short lifetime that they (at that time) definitely were not ready for prime time.
I wonder what the expected lifetime of the blue cells in these displays is?
looks like the market is being flooded with low profile displays... to the lamen all these technologies are one and the same "flat panels" meaning price will be a major factor in driving most peoples choices.
i certainly look foreward to some price deflation and being able to wallpaper my walls with oleds...
All the torrents you could want.
I thought Sony wasn't going to be OLEDs in 2004?
Yep. And thats exactly *why* it's not available.
Heck, film is simple, right? it's just 35 layers in less than the thickness of a human hair..