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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."
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
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.
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.
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...)
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.