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."

Comments

A Note From 2008

[pete-classic]

Hi,

It's me, Peter. I'm writing from 2008.

I still don't have an OLED display on my desktop.

I'm still the only person I know that uses Linux as his primary desktop.

I do have ATI drivers for Fedora Core 3 though!

-Peter

organic

[Anonymous Coward]

do you need to feed this thing?

Wooo!

[Remlik]

Awesome review, without any pictures or screen shots I imagine this to the best monitor ever. Since there is no price mentioned it must be under 100 dollars, and I only have to wait 3-5 years to get one that will last more than a month.

Gosh I just can't wait!

Re:Wooo!

[gl4ss]

so.. you were going to see the ultra high resolution and brightness on your screen?

I always get a kick out of tv adverts advertising tv's, and showing off their awesome brightness, contrast or whatever..

LED Life shorter

[swilly2006]

It says in the article that the life will be shorter than that of an LCD. I thought LED's pretty much lasted forever (~20 years).

Re:LED Life shorter

[hattig]

OLEDs have a lifespan of between 10000 and 50000 hours at the moment, I think it is the blue that has the lowest lifespan. Of course, the lifespans are a lot better than they were a couple of years ago!

Hopefully the shorter lives will be offset by the display being so much cheaper. Anyway, for computer displays most people would want to update the display after 5-7 years anyway, regardless of actual lifespan! 10000 hours is 3 years at 10 hours a day, or 6 years at 5 hours a day.

Re:LED Life shorter

[Dr. Spork]

The point is that OLED's are not made of the same stuff that your normal "big" LEDs are made of. What they have in common is that they are diodes and emit light. Consider that the Panasonic screen has over 18 million of them packed in an area the size of my monitor. That's pretty impressive.

What's not impressive is that they tend to grow fainter with time. The article says 10,000 hours before they lose half their brightness... that's not very long, and I'm sure you'd notice the effect well before the 10,000-hour point. Elsewhere I read that this dimming is not even across the color range, and that the images get progressively more red. LCD displays are supposed to lose half their brightness in 30,000 hours, which is not that much better imo. That makes me wonder about CRTs. My Sony 500PS is pushing 7 years and still looks beautiful. The only difference I notice is that it takes a bit longer to warm up than when it was new. Ah, trusty old CRT! As long as I keep my big desk, I probably won't even be thinking about a new monitor before 2008. I know that "degradation with time" probably makes the salespeople happy, but I know that when I'm looking to replace my monitor, I'll be looking for something that doesn't have an obsolescense plan.

Nice picture, but

[alhaz]

Why do i get the impression that it's bad at showing shades of blue?

Re:Nice picture, but

[lmaali]

Why do i get the impression that it's bad at showing shades of blue?

Traditionally the blue OLEDs have been the ones with shorter lifetimes not with poor color purity. I started doing resesarch on OLEDs in 1995 before most people had ven heard about them. But *much* research has been focused on better blue materials and they've made great strides in lifetime.

However, that the Samsung demo image contains no discernable blue is very strange indeed. I have my doubts that it was left out unintentionally.

Re:Nice picture, but

[jnaujok]

Uhm, it has pure white (Red+Green+BLUE) on the screen, and the white looks white, so it's not like the blue is failing. As a prototype, maybe they had issues with getting the blue into the bottom corners of the screen, and that's why they chose the particular image that they did, but I don't think you can say there is "no discernable blue" in the image. It's just hidden in the white.

Re:Nice picture, but

[lmaali]

Could be. The blue OLED was the hardest to produce, and fades quiker over time than the green or red. So as well as getting dimmer over time, OLED screens also develop a colour cast.

Not quite. The blue OLED materials typically have electronic properties (in particular, the LUMO level) that makes electrical connections difficult, but we've had blue materials for quite some time. There tends to be a large voltage drop at the cathode, this means they have to be driven harder (and hotter). Also, the photopic response of the eye is best in the green, so for displays (where blue and green are next to each other) the blue has to be driven even harder to be perceived to be as bright as the green by the eye. This has largely been responsible for the poor lifetimes of the blues.

But they aren't harder to make.

Re:Wow...

[hattig]

That's 6.22m subpixels really. 1920x1080 display, 3 subpixels (RGB) per pixel = 6220800 subpixels, or 2073600 full pixels.

Still, I would like this display, especially if it was cheap and suitable for computer work as well as video work.

Nonsense in Chosun article?

[Junior J. Junior III]

Can anyone make sense of this?

OLED display responses are 1,000 times faster than liquid crystal displays (LCDs), thus enabling greater resolution.

How does pixel response time have anything to do with resolution? That should strictly be a function of pixel size, shouldn't it? I have a feeling that someone didn't translate something right, or else flat out doesn't know what they're talking about.

Re:Nonsense in Chosun article?

[Sawbones]

While odds are it's just horrible writing there is one thing I can think of; it may be similar to the "wobulation" used on DLP displays.

Pop Sci link on wobulation

Basically since DLP displays can't be made to have a physical resolution high enough for HDTV but they can change pixels awfully fast they have each DLP element alternate display of two different colors very fast which tricks the eye into thinking it sees 4 pixels worth of information. The article does a much better job explaining it.

But yeah, odds are just crappy journalism.

Re:Nonsense in Chosun article?

[powermung]

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."

Resolution

[EnglishTim]

The resolution is quoted as being about 6.22 million pixels, which makes the resolution 1920x1080.

I assume the screen is 16x9, and that the quoted pixel count is counteing each red, green and blue element as seperate.

Incorrect. - 1920 x 1080

[EnglishTim]

It's 1920x1080 - the quoted pixel count is for each red, green and blue element.

Re:Seriously

[Zemrec]

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?

Picture

[Mahler]

Chosun.com has a picture

I strongly doubt that this picture is actual footage from the display picture-quality. Seems to me that they've inserted a nice image with some photo-editing software. It is just to show the outer case.

Re:Seriously

[khrtt]

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.

I wonder...

[koi88]

...using active matrix-based (AM) technology on Tuesday

I wonder what it's using the rest of the week... Maybe it goes into passive mode (or does this only happen on Sundays?

Re:Well

[Thagg]

I don't know Nash's theory, but what appears to be happening is that the different huge Asian conglomerates are each persuing different technologies. This is a relatively new thing in the TV market, and exposes a new layer of competition. Up until a few years ago, companies were mostly competing at the margins of features and price, and we had big, beautiful, feature-rich CRTs at remarkably low prices (and low margins for the manufacturers.)

Now, though, we see Sharp (for example) betting the ranch of LCDs, Toshiba and Canon going for broke on SEDs, Samsung and LG with these OLEDs, and other flogging plasma panels for all they're worth. Rather than competing on marginal features, they are all desperately competing in basic science and process engineering. It's amazing to watch, and I can imagine that the pressure on the development teams is intense -- because it's likely that all but one of these technologies will be abandoned when the winner is apparent.

I'm betting on SEDs, because they provide high quality, reasonable manufacturability, long life, and build on the best of current CRT technologies. OLEDs will rule if, in the end, it is possible to get the science to work -- I'm just not convinced yet that it is.

Thad Beier

A note from 1995

[objekt]

Pete, this is 1995, here. We want our lame attempt at humor back.

Almost forgot:

[khrtt]

4. LCDs are slow. This got better recently, but the problem is inherent in the way an LCD pixel turns off.

To turn a pixel on, you apply an electric potential that breaks up the crystal lattice and turns the liquid crystal molecules vertically WRT to glass. This can be made faster by using higher electric potential, perhaps.

To turn the pixel off, the long molecules of the liquid cristal material have to turn and recrystallize parallel to the glass, creating the twisted lattice that turns the polarization angle of the passing light. This happens by itself, w/o any energy input to the material, so you can't just "crank up the power" and hope for a faster display - you have to invent a material whose energy is significantly lower when it's crystallized parallel to the grooves in the glass than when it's not.

OLED displays, OTOH, turns on and off within microseconds, just like any LED.

Re:Seriously

[ed1park]

How LCD's work.
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/lcd.ht m

Vacuum-filled glass jar? Hehe, i like that.

Fill my jar with vacuum please! And don't be stingy about it! ;)

Re:technology press run amok ... again

[Stealth Potato]

Also, this little gem:

Samsung Electronics unveiled the world's largest 21-inch organic light emitting diode (OLED) display...

Hmm... Maybe I should call Guinness; I might just have the world's heaviest 8-ounce potato!