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Sony Launches 3mm Thin XEL-1 OLED TV
i4u writes "Sony introduces their first commercial OLED TV, the XEL-1. The stunning XEL-1 is what Sony teased on Friday on their site in Japan. The XEL-1 is an 11-inch display that is only 3 mm thin. It features a dramatic 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and the power consumption is a low 45 W. Sony plans to start shipping the XEL-1 OLED TV on December 1 for 200,000 Yen (~$1,740). Here is Sony's OLED TV product page (in Japanese)."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I didn't see any mention of the lifespan of the OLED screen?
Has something changed recently, or is the TV likely to start looking funny in a year when the blue fades?
i bet buried in the fine print you'll see that color fading isn't covered under the warranty.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Did anyone else notice the RJ45 jack on the back? What's that for? Built-in Tivo perhaps?
The game.
into such a slim screen ;-)
Timo's Audio Software http://www.esseraudio.com
"The XEL-1 is an 11-inch display that is only 3 mm thin"
...little in the middle but she got much back.
...what about that honking great ugly box at the bottom of it that's way bigger than 3mm deep and obviously has to sit under the TV?
Granted, it's cool that Sony have developed an OLED TV, but sorry I don't see the point of having a wafer thin screen when the base unit looks like a brick. If you could remotely stick the box somewhere else and wallmount the TV that'd be nice, but from what I can tell, you can't.
The thin part is great, but they need to find a way to produce OLEDs TVs that are bigger. Even for hard core geeks like me, I don't want an 11 inch TV. And it's hard to produce a 42" OLED.
I think we're going to have a mini baby-boom in 9 months, considering that male geek world-wide will have painful erections from through the end of the day.
stuff it in a laptop, the thinness, lightness and power consumption is a sure winner there.
ditto mobile multimedia.
for domestic consumer electronics the thinness is irrelevant except for high end concept ware where people are willing to pay through the nose.
the thinness is also irrelevant if it has to be stuck on an ungly base unit (see TFA) for real jawdropping effect it should be displayed by itself with a well hidden cable in the support going to a much better hidden base unit in the wall, furniture or somewhere else.
still on the plus side the contrast and brightness sure looks good. hope it still stays that could and does not get destroyed by direct sunlight a few months after purchase.
"and the power consumption is a low 45 W"
Current laptop 17" LCDs have power consumption around 15W or so.
45W from an 11inch display is not, by a long shot, low-power. If that scales linearily with screen real-estate, then that is equivalent to 600W for a 40 inch (the current top-seller size), which is aproximately 3 times the power used by an average flat-screen TV of that size sold currently.
Quote from the linked article: "This is a very high price for an 11 inch TV, but it is the first OLED TV to buy. Early adoption always had its price."
I guess that sentence is trying to sell people on the idea that early adoption is acceptable, even if the price is 20 times higher than earlier equipment with the same functionality.
I will wait to buy it until it has DTT. (Digital Turnip Twaddling)
For the same reason civilization has spent HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS over the course of THE PAST FEW CENTURIES developing and refining WALL PAINT. Why didn't we just TILE the walls?
BECAUSE EVERY MILLIMETER COUNTS!
(note: subject is actually a question ... ?)
I'd like to damn well think the blacks are good anyhow.
I'm a die hard CRT lover, I've detested the quality of the picture on LCD's for a long long time, I guess you could say I'm a videophile.
All that being said, I only just recently caved, yes I've caved, even CRT lover dan at dansdata has caved.
I picked up a Dell 2407 WFP HC screen, which apparently does colours quite well.
I purchased this because for 3 years people have been proclaiming how good LCD's are now and how widescreen is the future, how ghosting is a thing of the past, viewing angles aren't a worry, scaling with fixed pixel width is fine and blacks levels are fine on modern LCD's
Well, I'm one person who has purchased a product who has the balls to speak the truth rather than defend my money spent.
Firstly, I love widescreen, it's bloody awesome, period - great stuff.
I LOVE the extra desk space!
Fixed pixel width is certainly not bugging me in games anywhere near as much as I thought it would and I don't change resolution often in Windows anyhow (I guess I used to with my CRT)
Refresh rates and ghosting is right on the limit, it's not ideal but it's certianly nothing to fret about either.
However....
Black levels and viewing angles are ok now? - I think not people, I think not.
In bright games, the picture quality, coupled with the widescreen awesomeness of above, lovely stuff, just lovely.
I tried Oblivion though and in the caves, oh those caves, I felt the 'silverfish' effect - the blacks shimmer and refract light or something die to viewing angle nastyness.
The picture, quite literally reminded me of waking up in the morning with sleep in the corners of my eyes, I found myself rubbing my left eye constantly to try and remove said sleep.
Clearly I couldn't, it wasn't actually there, infact within about 30 minutes of playing, I simply couldn't play anymore.
I was shocked, I am not the headache type or the motion sickness type but this was quite literally making me irritated, not sick but I couldn't play due to the distraction in the corner of the display (both left and right)
The viewing angles are simply too tight for this monitor, the solution of course is to sit futher away, however why would I want to? This is why I purchased a huge 24" monitor, so that the picture is immersive and great, not something I push to the far edge of my desk, otherwise it's just too small again.
I've also tried Half Life 2 - the black scenes in that do the same thing, I honestly do not know how people play any dark games on an LCD at all, it's simply not a pleasant experience.
In some regards I miss my 22" CRT, it was a high end tube, did over 100hz at 1600x1200, some ridiculous figures at 1024 (140+ etc)
So ultimately, my question is or rather my demand is, does OLED solve these issues?
I've heard it does, but does it REALLY? LCD is (according to THOUSANDS of people on the web) apparently "as good or better" than CRT now (I beg to differ)
If I could just solve that issue with the shimmery blacks, I'd be fine but until then, for true videophiles, I just can't recommend an LCD still, hence me having a near 200lb CRT beast in the loungeroom as a television.
Help me OLED, you're my only hope.
1. They will produce only 2000 of those per year.
2. The product for OLED was selected not to be practical but newsworthy. Everyday Joe cares about TV-s, although he won't buy this one, he'll read about it, so newspapers will write about it. Consider: OLED has shorter pixel life and wastes less power than LCD+light. Where is this useful? Laptops (limited energy and no constant use). Where is it harmful? TV-s (constant use and unlimited AC power).
3. The design is made to impress, not be practical. Notice they put the tuner down in an ugly box to show off the very thin OLED display (no backlight). Notice the off-center hinge, designed to stress how light the screen is (puts unneeded stress, however small, on the materials).
Bottom line is, of course, great that someone is pushing OLED for something bigger than a camera preview screen. But it's NOT mass produced product. They make just few units, to make the news.
It's a product straight from the PR department. I suspect Sony Rolly will have similar fate.
Those aren't products made to sell, they're made to rebuild the image of Sony as the cool tech company. However, years ago they were the cool tech company which mass produced goods that are at the same practical, high tech, and luxury.
Those new gadgets don't send the same message. Wish them good luck with this, maybe if they keep producing gadgets like those at this pace, at some point they'll hit a homerun again...
NOTE: I just realised this could read that I'm dan from dansdata, I'm not - but we both share the same harsh attitude towards LCD's (and dopey users claiming CRT is dead, who don't know they can do more than 60hz)
- anonymouse posting, not trying to karma whore.
why are they marketing it as a tv? who the hell cares about about have 1M:1 contrast when watching a 80s rerun? they should be marketing it as an awesome desktop publishing and imaging monitor for PCs and Macs, or perhaps studio monitor. i'm just happy they are finally coming out with something that actually may have better image quality than my 22" CRT, looks like i could be upgrading in 2 years or so :)
Where's my 2-way wrist radio, which we'd now call a "wristphone"? Starring another Modern innovation, the videophone?
I might not whine about no flying cars as much, if we could just get some of the cheaper items that don't crash into neighbors' roofs.
--
make install -not war
Since this thing is a Sony, I'm sure it will be overloaded with DRM.
Sony has proved several times in the recent past that they cannot be trusted anymore regarding respect for people's privacy and consumer rights. I'll be saving my money for when the more decent and trustworthy manufacturers start selling similar products.
Bye bye, Sony! Whatever fancy products you'll offer, I'll never do business with you anymore.
An LCD shows a black pixel by trying (not quite successfully as it turns out) to block out the light from a bright white back-light behind it. An OLED shows a black pixel by just not turning on the pixel - there's no back-light to try to hide because the pixels themselves are the light emitters. You can reasonably expect an 'off' pixel to be as black as the whole display is when it is switched off.
The XEL-1 is an 11 inch display that is only 3mm thin.
These go to Eleven!
So there isn't really any benefits of the screen over LCD or plasma apart from the contrast and the wattage in that article. Are sony be going to subsidise the carbon credits on these things?
Was whoever wrote this paid for each time he/she/it wrote "XEL-1 OLED TV?" I count five instances of "XEL-1" in the summary alone.
http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~mahesri/research/PACS_paper.pdf (pg 5) 3D Mark brings a 1.3ghz pentium with a 14.1" screen just over 30W
Everyone who is saying this thing needs to be 40 inches is missing the point, it doesn't need to get bigger.. it needs to get smaller! If you shrink this ultra hi def oled screen to the size of a pair of glasses you can take your "40 inch" screen wherever you go and you only need one for every room in your house!
> I really don't see the point of having a display 3mm thin when
> it still needs more than a thirtyfold space of that to place
> it somewhere.
You don't share their enthusiasm for marketing.
--Richard
Oh sir... it's only wafer thin!
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
There is no "one accepted way" to measure contrast ratio, so manufacturers will make up the most ridiculous numbers to make them sound better.
1,000,000:1 is far, far greater than projected film in a darkened theater (which is probably around 200:1) which still has the greatest contrast ratio.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
If they only last 1/2 as long as the reds and greens, why not put two blues by each red and green? During normal use, the backup blues wouldn't be used. When the original blues start to go bad, switch to using the backup blues. You could double the effective lifespan of the display and I don't think it would add that much cost...
That's too bad. I was hoping for 2mm thin, but this one is only 3mm thin.
Those marketeers are too smart for their own good.
(Note, not flaming, honest questions)
Is this a perception thing, like DLP artifacts? I ask because I'm also pretty picky when it comes to displays (I'm a photographer) and I honestly don't see any of the problems you mention, and haven't on any decent LCD for a long time. I'm currently looking at a 3 or 4 year old 20" Eizo and just for kicks I flipped it around so I was looking at it almost 90 degrees on. Apart from some glare it looked fine - black is black, white is white and everything else is just peachy. At home I have a pair of Dell 20" screens (not widescreen) and again, I don't notice any issues. I don't game on that machine a lot, but when I do I haven't noticed any problems with blacks (and I've played FEAR and Doom 3 on it, which are pretty dark games).
Maybe some callibration would help, or maybe some people's eyes respond differently and they pick up on different problems? I stopped using CRT 4 years ago and I have no desire whatsoever to go back. What's interesting though is that I have yet to find an LCD TV that I can watch...they never look anywhere near as good as a plasma to me, although I know plenty of people who hate plasma. I guess it's all personal.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
The least the editors could do when editing a summary is fix marketing bullshit like "3mm thin". It's "3mm thick".
While I'm here let me tell the eds about this other thing a lot of news sites like to have called "balance". In this case, it might have helped to mention the high cost in order to give the reader a full and balanced overview. Relying on tags is not the way to run a reputable news site.
Oh, wait...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
See here (in Japanese); it can talk to HDD recorders or PCs and play back stuff over a LAN.
Looks like the TV has an XMB, too. I guess they had to do something with all those PS3s they can't sell . . .
...I can buy a keyboard for that!
Apparantly the italians think there is a new kind of light out there instead of a "new" kind of diode, an organic light!
:-)
I share an office here at uni with an italian and he was telling me about an italian news paper that was covering this story. There they didn't say the diode was organic, but the light was organic! I wonder how the reporter who wrote that piece thought they produced organic light
It looks like 30 mm to me and not 3 mm.
Contrast ratio is the brightness of white vs. the brightness of black. Given equal white brightness, it should mean that the black is blacker. Unfortunately, it is a number companies plays tricks with, such as using the brightest the screen gets when all-white at its brightest setting, and the dimmest when it's all black, maybe with backlight dimmed and so on.
Frankly, I'm not missing my CRT much. I even had high end consumer displays, 21" flats. I hated how the geometry gradually shirts over time, I hated fixing geometry problems, and the brightness of black varied by how many and how bright other things are on the screen. And the local magnetic fields made it wobble, so I had to put the Hz such that it's in cadence with power because of a nearby fan in the A/C ducts. Off-angle color is dependent on the LCD substrate. The Dell Ultrasharps do use the kind of LCD that's better for that.
For entertainment, I'm using a 1080p LCD projector. There aren't any color shift issues due to off-angle viewing with that. The colors are great and the black is quite black.
"Where's my 2-way wrist radio, which we'd now call a "wristphone"?" "
Have you SEEN the size of high end watches these days? Like a Panarai? Most modern cel phones are smaller.
Just put a friggin cel phone on a Panarai watch strap. Voila. Done.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I, also, have a Dell 20" with 1600x1200 resolution, and haven't really noticed many color issues. While the blacks certainly aren't perfect, they don't have any weird silvery issues. My guess is that the wide-screens have more polarization issues due to the extended viewing angles.
960 x 540? why are they even bothering with that?
It sounds like OLED should be much cheaper to mass produce than LCD so these prices are artificially high and should come down fast once they get the kinks worked out.
Call me when there's a 50" full HD spec(1920x1080) one for sale around the same price as LCD and plasma are now.
There are in fact two relevant contrast ratios to consider. One is the ratio between the brightest white it can display in a full screen and the darkest black it can display full screen. The other is the ratio between the white and black when both are displayed simultaneously.
What people don't realize (because CRTs typically don't include contrast specs) is that while a CRT can achieve ~15,000:1 dynamic contrast (i.e. the ratio between an all white and an all black screen), the reality is when you put both black and white together, one washes the other one out. CRTs, in actuality, can't do much more than about 500:1 contrast.
The key point is that dynamic contrast is not a bullshit marketing term. The reason CRTs have apparently great black levels is because their dynamic contrast is much higher than that of LCD screens. An LCD with a panel contrast of 1000:1 and no other backlight tricks will have a dynamic contrast of 1000:1. Thats why in bright-overall scenes, it looks GREAT, but in dark scenes it washes out. In bright scenes on an LCD vs a CRT, you're basically comparing ansi contrast to ansi contrast, and LCD can get ~1000:1 with no washout. A CRT can't. In dark screens, an LCD can't make quite as dark blacks, so you're now comparing dynamic vs dynamic contrast. The CRT could pull in 15,000:1, but the LCD is still stuck at 1,000:1.
Current displays improve this by varying the intensity of the light source, then stretching the brightness of an average-dark image to maintain the full panel contrast. That way, you can get the full ansi contrast over a wider range of actual brightness values. It looks like current LCD monitors vary the black light to increase dynamic contrast from 1000:1 to 3000:1, and LCD projectors can open and close an aperture in the lens to jack dynamic contrast up to 10,000:1.
The point is, there are two types of contrast. LCD beats the crap out of CRT in one type, but CRT beats the crap out of LCD in the other type. Neither specs are marketing BS, and you need to know both to understand how contrasty a screen will look in practice.
does anybody remember hearing anything about SED monitors...i remember Sony had something similiar to it called FED. I honestly thought that FED's were going to be 'the wave of the future'...not so much OLED monitors.
My 17" uses a wee bit less power than that... so why would it be a good thing that an 11" uses more power than my 17"?
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
almost two grand for eleven inches. Now if Sony had managed to come up with a workable penis enlargement scheme, that $158.18 per inch would be very reasonable, not to mention more popular than any video display ever made.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Clarification:
:)
When I said I was looking at it 90 degrees on, I meant 90 degress from normal, which would be 180 degrees I guess. Basically, I was looking at the thing sideways
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Yes, I am in the dreaded Sony support for my LCD TV bought 3 years ago.
Nice blue blob on my screen, and Sony warranty is extended on all models that used my light engine, except for my model....go figure. They said that I could write to their 'executive review board' but if I'm shelling out 1500 dollars for a new LCD engine, then I'd rather buy a new TV of the same size for 500 bucks more....with a warranty.
I'd think really hard about buying another sony, 3500 dollars for 3 years isn't worth it. On top of it they use the dreaded offshore tech support.
So Sony is using new technology...meh, I'd wait for a couple of years and see if it causes any problems.
These guys went for thick, but that's because they had to stuff all the mechanics in the edges to leave the centre totally transparent. When I saw this watch for the first time in Zurich it took my brain a couple of secs to order a double take and work out how on earth the hands moved.
It's IMHO totally pointless, but quite a fun idea..
Insert
equals next week's story!