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GE Announces OLED Manufacturing Breakthrough
bughunter writes "Today GE announced the successful demonstration of the world's first roll-to-roll manufactured organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting devices (press release). This demonstration is a key step toward making OLEDs and other high-performance organic electronics products at dramatically lower costs than what is possible today. The green crowd is thrilled as well. Personally, as the parent of a 3-year-old technophile, I'm dreading the animated cereal boxes." Now can I get my Optimus Keyboard for less than $1,299?
"Personally, as the parent of a 3-year-old technophile, I'm dreading the animated cereal boxes
Ok, then don't buy them.
Personally, as the parent of a 3-year-old technophile, I'm dreading the animated cereal boxes.
In another twenty years there will likely not be a surface anywhere that isn't animated. The animated billboards and signs are already here.
As if having blinking shiney flashey crap on the internet isn't bad enough now we're subjected to it in meatspace.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
In other words, it's one thing to demonstrate a prototype product, but an entirely other thing to demonstrate how you actually plan to mass produce that product, which this is!
Of course, it's yet another thing to actually produce your production equipment and drive adoption among manufacturers, but this announement is still one major step beyond most next-gen display announcements (SED, I'm looking at you...).
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
If they say they have a production process for making something in quantity, they probably do.
The OP wasn't arguing that GE doesn't have the production process. He/she just wasn't convinced that the process was "a breakthrough." The photo I saw looked like the LEDs were about 1 inch square each, and the attached article suggested that they were about twice as efficient per lumen as incandescent lighting. The efficiency of incandescent lighting isn't exactly hard to beat.
Would you consider a new process for manufacturing buggy whips to be a "breakthrough?" I'm not saying it's NOT a breakthrough, (obviously this could lead to amazing display technology) but I agree with the point the OP was trying to make: it would be nice to have more details.
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It seems pretty silly to me that people think we are helping the environment by saving a few watts on our computer monitors. Meanwhile, billions of people are coming onto the grid and using coal power. It isn't even a drop in the ocean.
I see people putting up a few solar panels here and there, maybe generating enough energy to take a fraction out of their air conditioning bill, and I wonder if they are stupid. Even if everyone in the united states did the same thing, or even the entire world did the same thing, the carbon output would still be rising because industry requires a phenomenal amount of energy that can't be supplied or even offset significantly by these sorts of technologies.
These sorts of efforts are all about feeling good about the environment, while actually doing nothing to put a significant dent in the carbon output and reduce the damage that global warming will cause. Switching over to OLED monitors is kind of like spitting into a volcano to stop an eruption.
The truth is that most of the green technologies being put forward today are just fashion statements and a distraction from the real solutions, and it is technically impossible to solve our real problems with them. Most carbon output comes from power generation and transportation. In order to make a dent, we need to switch almost entirely over to power sources that have no carbon output, and we need to make a major push to mass transit.
Unfortunately, the issues get complicated in regards to power generation without carbon because the only existing technology that could replace all of our coal plants is nuclear power, and there isn't a lot of political will for nuclear power in the united states. Usually people put forward solar power, wind power, or biofuel as solutions, unfortunately, when you actually look at solar power and wind power, it is technically impossible to make a dent in our power output with these technologies because they only generate power a small percentage of the time, whereas power draw stays high 24/7. Biofuel production on the other hand actually generates more carbon than coal once you try to scale it up, and the government initiatives related to it are a huge fiasco.
People keep waiting around for an easy solution to our problems, and one that makes them feel good. Unfortunately, that's not how life works, all of the solutions have downsides and all of them require us to make sacrifices. Sadly, it's pretty obvious that we're going to wait until the situation is much more desperate than it already is before making significant efforts at change.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?