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?

Comments

What Was the Cost?

[eldavojohn]

Now can I get my Optimus Keyboard for less than $1,299? Well, I didn't see a price. I saw that it was 'green' as it was making organic LEDs but how was it any greener than the old procedure for making OLEDs? Nor did they state it was faster or cheaper. They said it took four years to do this, how long did it take to make the strip pictured? What raw materials went into that (or what were the costs for that strip)?

I would be excited ... if there were more details convincing me this is a 'breakthrough.' That word gets thrown around a lot these days.

Is this for lighting or displays?

[badboy_tw2002]

Most of the linked articles talk about "new technology for lighting" as in panel lights for rooms and such. Are these panels being manufactured for display tech too? Or is the refresh rate not fast enough yet?

Cost?

[WaHooCrazy7]

How much did the cost come down? I couldn't find a figure in the article that stated any hard facts that this is really going to materialize.

Green production?

[NMajik]

Although the OLEDs require significantly less energy to power and are "green" in that respect, I would like to read more about the environmental impact of producing them; not just at the so called roll to roll level, but all the way from raw material to finished product. Many a "green" product has had unforeseen side effects that have made them unfavorable.

Re:Ok, so how about this idea...

[itof500]

I found that not having a television in the house remarkably reduced this sort of activity. And then, once they are old enough, I used to give them 'missions'. The missions were - go and get me a box of x, and they got a point for each completion. When they accumulated 5 pts, I'd buy them a treat they wanted at the checkout counter. When they got into grade school I'd give them the calculator and have them find the least expensive of X. It made grocery shopping something of a fun game for us.

duke out

Re:Ok, so how about this idea...

[geekoid]

"..have to buy 'em or deal with the crazed screaming/whining/sulking that will ensue."
consistency is key.
My kids don't whine and scream when we ahve said no to something consistently. They few things where we broke consistently still haunt us... sigh. Live and learn.
Even then they learn, it's just a longer process.

Animated meatspace

[bornwaysouth]

> Personally, as the parent of a 3-year-old technophile, I'm dreading the animated cereal boxes.

I can see the counter-adverts on the ordinary boxes now "GE Free". And on the animated boxes "Cereal may contain nuts and batteries"

What I have been wanting for some time is something to brighten the sheer boredom of riding in a corporate lift. (I accept that stores and the like will batter a captive audience with ads so they are tortured into compliance by the time they arrive. Shut eyes, turn up iPod.)

The idea is to have something other than, say, a big 13 drifting past to tell you you have passed floor 13. I'd like a small 13, but some nice elevation dependent pictures. Earth and grass for the ground floor. Apples or tweety-birds for the next floor and so on. Eagles well up. And of course, space junk for senior managerial levels. Top floor a galaxy, with a warning that they are only 4% ordinary matter.

But I am bothered about the basement images. I'd rather avoid drippy caves, and anything with religious overtones. Suggestions anyone?

OLED displays needed

[TheSync]

One of the things we've found out is that no HD LCD, plasma, or rear-projection DLP displays are as good as a broadcast reference CRT monitor in terms of luminance dynamic range, viewing angle, or color gamut. Only front-projection DLPs seem to be able to match good quality CRTs, but then you need all that space for the projection.

OLEDs have a real chance of matching or even beating CRTs in a true "flat panel" form factor.

And I also like the idea of using OLED rolls as wallpaper so we can have 7,680 × 4,320 pixel video on the wall (which will, of course, need 22.2 surround sound (UHDTV).

Re:OLED displays needed

[TheSync]

If you want viewing angle, you're distorting the picture significantly in space, so losing a little luminance or color fidelity shouldn't be too big a deal

In the broadcast engineering world, we like to have two people looking at a monitor at the same time to be able to see the same color & luminance on a pixel. Plus in a broadcast control room, you aren't sitting on a sofa, you may be moving around the room but needing to occasionally look back and need to be able to see what is going over the air to millions of people.

Some of the LCD monitors I've seen have good horizontal and vertical viewing angles, but it turns out that any offset in a diagonal direction is unusable for critical viewing.

You are right about CRTs. Professional-quality HD CRTs are basically no longer made. You plopped down $50,000 for one five years ago, but now there are none except in the used market.

Here are the user requirements for reference monitors from the EBU.

I should add that plasmas in particular have really truncated color gamuts. They cannot represent all the Rec. 709 colors at any reasonable brightness, thus they tend to
"stretch the greens" which the eye is more sensitive to in order to look bright. Many plasmas also have a "turn-on jump" from a totally black pixel to one that has any light output that tends to accentuate noise in dark areas.

Re:GE is up nearly 5%

[Knara]

Yeah. Back when I was just learning about investing (I'm still, mind you), I bought a small amount of a few large caps so I'd have some "skin in the game" to make me pay attention. GE was my best performer over time.

Currently I stick to index funds (or other passive funds with low costs) because I don't have the time to pay attention or research as much as would be necessary.

Re:Organic != 'Green'

[dgatwood]

What makes OLED's 'green' is that they don't require back lighting like LCD displays. Which means you can generate images for a fraction of the electrical draw.

Except that it isn't a fraction of the electrical draw---not if they're only 2-3x the efficiency of an incandescent bulb, anyway. Traditional LEDs are close to ten times the efficiency of incandescents, so if you do an LED backlight behind an LCD panel, you'd have to lose 60-80% of the brightness passing through the LCD panel to get down to such a low efficiency. Okay, so the panel itself probably doubles the power use, so that probably puts the LCD panel with LED backlight at somewhere in the neighborhood of the same amount of power. This is, of course, just a ballpark guess, since there aren't production OLED panels available for real-world comparison, but I'm not expecting a huge power win from emissive displays. An advantage, yes, but certainly not enough to call it "a fraction of the electrical draw" unless the numbers I've heard so far are way, way off.

OLEDs have advantages, though. They can be used in places where backlighting is impractical---keyboards, for example. They don't wash out as much in bright light, so they are more practical for outdoor displays. They don't restrict the light to a narrow polarity range, so wearing polarized sunglasses doesn't make the screen go black, and you can read your watch by the emitted light, unlike the light from your LCD panel. They have a dramatically faster refresh rate than LCDs, so motion isn't smeared as much.

On the flip side, they also, IIRC, have a shorter life expectancy, though this has probably improved somewhat over the years---good for manufacturers, not so good for consumers. LCD panels have orders of magnitude better life expectancy (on the order of 300,000 hours), sun damage notwithstanding, though the backlights generally need to be replaced much more frequently. Replacing a backlight tube (or even an LED backlight) is a lot cheaper than replacing the whole panel, though.