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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)."
into such a slim screen ;-)
Timo's Audio Software http://www.esseraudio.com
"and the power consumption is a low 45 W"
Current laptop 17" LCDs have power consumption around 15W or so.
Lifespans are at acceptable consumer grade (25,000-50,000 hours+ - equivalent to a modern CRT). The big manufacturers don't put these into production lines without the consumer lifespans being hit - part of the reason that it has taken until 2007 for oleds to move beyond mp3 display screens Polymer OLED's (a different technology from what Sony are using) are a bit behind, CDT were reporting blue lifetimes of 6,000-10,000 hours (red and green are fine). That is a bit understandable though, as polymer oled technology is newer and less well developed than small molecule vacuum deposition oleds (what sony and almost everyone else are using).
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.
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.