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Samsung Shows Off 21" OLED Display
aztektum writes "C|Net and Technewsworld.com have posted stories about Samsung's new 21" OLED.
Chosun.com has a picture and a projection that OLEDs will be a 2.2 billion dollar a year market by 2008."
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AFAIK, they're called "organic" because they're based on organic molecules, i.e. organic chemistry, which is primarily concerned with carbon-based long chain molecules.
IANAChemist, but that's my take on it.
One thing that I wondered about is the article says OLEDs require more power than LCDs at the present time. I thought that one of the main benefits of OLED was that they'd use a lot less power and so would extend laptop battery life, amongst other things.
Can anyone explain that?
I thought that one of the main benefits of OLED was that they'd use a lot less power
This is because an LCD display is inherently inefficient. We can realistically assume that the LCD matrix itself has near-zero power requirements, and the backlight is somewhat more efficient as the OLED in converting electricity to light. However, the color filters in the LCD cut out at least 2/3 of the light output, and the polarizers eats up 1/2 of the rest, and the remaining 16% of the light is the white level. In other words, if your LCD screen is all white the efficiency is no more than 16% of the backlight output, and if your screen is black, the efficiency is 0.
There are other issues with LCD:
1. Contrast. The black areas of the LCD always leak some light, creating the contrast issue. With OLED, black means "light off", so the issue isn't there, unless you were using shitty drive electronics that prevented you from turning the output off completely, which would be stupid.
2. Viewing angle. All LCDs have this issue, even though it's gotten much, much better with the newer ones. The reason for this problem is that. angle of polarization doesn't rotate properly when the light goes through the liquid cristal at an angle.
3. LCDs are mechanically awkward. They are sure better than a vacuum-filled glass jar, but there still have to be two sheets of high-precision glass with a precisely controlled gap in between, and a backlight tube. The whole thing is rather fragile. An OLED doesn't really have to have any glass in it at all, even though the first ones do.
It seems like a translation error. Nowhere in the original Korean version of the article mentions higher resolution. The corresponding section should have been translated "enables smoother video/animation display."