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Sony Shows Off Flexible OLED Screens At CES
An anonymous reader writes "Sony's stand at CES had a small area set aside for flexible OLED screens, along with three mock-ups of possible OLED devices (including one stunning ultra-portable with no hinge and a single display for both screen and keyboard). There was also a working OLED screen being bent back and forth while playing a video clip. Does this mean roll-up, low-power colour screens will soon hit the market? Not unless OLED prices come down — Sony's stunning XEL-1 OLED TV costs $2,500, but only has an 11in screen ..."
...And if you use it to watch pirated movies then it will curl up and die on you!
Color chaning clothes!
The invisibility cloak is finally on it's way.
I can't buy Sony anything; once bitten, twice shy. Never again will Sony have the chance to fuck me over like that.
along with three mock-ups of possible OLED devices
I.e., lies. But what do you expect from sociopaths who would install rootkits in music CD, especially install rootkits that contain copyrighted FOSS that they have no right to use?
And no, I will NOT let this rest. Sony owes me for the purchase of MS XP (since video drivers were no longer available for 98) and an Audigy sound card, as well as several hours of my time. I can no longer trust Sony and refuse to buy from them, and consider anyone who would be a Sony customer extremely stupid and short sighted.
Not unless OLED prices come down
You can count on it. In five years an OLED screen may well be a couple of bucks.
Free Martian Whores!
TV content stays the same quality; it's your taste that's changing. A five-year-old will love pretty much any trash you put in front of her; a fifty-year-old is either (a) still in love with the same stuff she saw when she was five, or (b) watching on a much more complicated level, and requires far more meaning and technical skill in their content.
The fashion changes, but the target demographic remains the same - gullible people who are easy to convince to spend money.
egypt urnash minimal art.
Instead of pulling down the whitescreen for a TV projector from a roll, you actually roll down the TV itself - flexible screen comlpete with black backing and polymer based circuitry. 10 years I reckon before these are in the shops.
Have you checked the quality of old TV content lately. It is quite bad and predictable. Just because your getting Old you fail to see that.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Hey now, My Mother the Car was a triumph of Shakespearean proportions!
Now Anonymous Coward is going to run around the internet shouting "Will it BEND??"
You can be completely in the right and yet still post something that will attract people with poor emotional control. In fact, let me add, on some subjects the more right you are the more hate mail you will get. It's always seemed to me that "flamebait" is a legacy moderation from the early days of the internet. It covers everything from "holds divergent opinions from some people" to "complete and utter asshole". But nowadays it's mostly (IMNSHO) used by fanboys to defend their obsession with one bit of plastic covered electronics over another.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Also at the show were examples of Samsungs prototype transparent OLED screens. It offers another way to "put yourself in the picture" http://www.oled-info.com/files/images/Samsung_Transparent_OLED_Ces_2009.jpg and http://www.oled-info.com/files/images/Samsung_Transparent_OLED_Ces_2009_2.jpg
They are fantastic - million contrast ratio for page-size screen. However its still over $2K at the lcoal Sony store.
I had some old Windows-only games. I run Mandriva dual boot, with networking disabled on the Windows side.
Free Martian Whores!
a fifty-year-old is either (a) still in love with the same stuff she saw when she was five, or (b) watching on a much more complicated level, and requires far more meaning and technical skill in their content.
Dear Sir,
I wish to complain in the strongest possible terms about your use of the feminine pronoun "she". Some of my best male friends are 50, and only a few of them are transvestites.
Yours faithfully, Brigadier Sir Charles Arthur Strong (Mrs.)
P.S. That my mother made me wear ribbons in my hair when I was five is nobody's business.
A few points about OLED:
1) The optimal solution right now is flourescent blue combined with PHOLED red and green (phosphorescent). It's unclear right now how much PHOLED is being used in Sony's sets.
PHOLED is important primarily for power consumption which is why OLED screens are showing up more frequently in mobile devices. Nokia recently mandated that their suppliers have supply capability for OLED. Samsung is the major proponent of using PHOLED although LG and others are on board with materials+royalty contracts in place.
2) Samsung's recent statements about larger screen sizes (30"+) being far into the future seem to be due to two issues. First, although current LCD lines can be relatively easily retrofitted to produce OLED panels, production capacity is just starting to be scaled.
Second, and probably more importantly, the major LCD panel manufacturers have a major investment to be paid off in the later gen lines that recently came online.
3) The major issues facing OLED right now are packaging, lifetime and defect rate. The molecules degrade rapidly when exposed to oxygen/moisture so much tighter packaging is required (largely solved). Blue lifetime (both molecule sizes) was a problem in the past, 30k+ hours is now realistic. Defect rate applies to larger panels and is why 30"+ screens will be prohibitively expensive for now (Samsung has produced prototypes though so it isn't vaporware).
4) PHOLED can reach 100% EQE, flourescent around 25%. PMOLED is still viable but PHOLED should (imho) be the ideal molecule in the future. PHOLED deep blue with adequate lifetime is still the major hurdle, sky blue is ready to go.
5) OLED isn't just display. Lighting is arguably a larger market in the long run. Current specs are around 50lm/W but 100lm/W PHOLED has been successfully demonstrated. 150lm/W is pushing the envelope but not unrealistic.
GE is pushing its roll-to-roll initiative. Philips is aggressively heading toward commercial production. OLED lighting offers lower power consumption, temperature tunability, flexibility, flat panel replacement and fault tolerance (in the respect that a hole in the middle of the panel won't take out the entire structure). Universal Display recently received a grant with Armstrong to engineer tiles for commercial use.
6) OLED's appeal is not just a better display and flexibility; thickness (sub-1mm) and transparency are important factors for future designs and mass acceptance as a technology (Youtube has many videos about the Samsung prototypes).
7) The technology is way past the prototype stage, like where FED and SED have been stuck. Kodak, Dupont, BASF and every Japanese and Korean company you can name are involved (i.e. heavily investing) in OLED. Not to mention that the Chinese are going online this year in a big way. Will it replace LCD for display? Not any time soon. The question is not how many applications there are to make it viable, it's how soon these apps will gain critical mass in the marketplace.
Google for further information.
Fine with me. That's probably about the time I'll finally give up my tried and true CRT for something new. Up to now, I've just kept it, because what with format wars in the blu ray space, expensive content sources (whether it be players, the discs themselves, or HD cable), three competing large screen technologies (LCD, Plasma and rear projection) all with their own problems, TVs not always being 1080p, and sometimes just 1080i, changing cable designs, etc, I figured I just keep my CRT until OLED came along and killed them all. No sense spending thousands trying to guess which technology isn't going to be obsolete or which one isn't going to have tons of problems.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I have seen the Sony OLED TV (FYI, the resolution is quarter-1080p 960x540), but one thing I noticed is... the flicker during bright scenes. Now, I don't know if it was caused by the source (blu-ray player), the cabling (running 1080p24), or the scaler (both the size and framerate adjust). It was the light images, but I'm just somewhat concerned that we'll end up in the days of screens that flicker again. (Nothing's more annoying that someone who has their CRT set to 60Hz refresh).
I'm thinking it's just a scalar issue, but I've seen it on some of the OLED screens used in MP3 players...
I'm racking my brain for a connection between this story and that line from Bladerunner. Anyone have a clue?
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
Not sure why you're modded flamebait - I feel like as I've gotten older there's a lot more TV shows that I actually like. Characters are more complex, shows tend to be more serial than episodic with plotlines extending over the course of a season. Also because there are more channels you get things more tailored to specific tastes. Shows like "Dexter" or "The Shield" or even BSG would not have made it in the 70's or 80's.
Can we at least try to compare apples with apples. A 20inch is 55% larger than a 11inch tv, so does this even save power?
Don't forget there is a difference of getting older and getting old.
Get older and gaining experience is a good thing.
Getting old and closing your mind to new ideas is a bad thing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Shows like "Dexter" or "The Shield" or even BSG would not have made it in the 70's or 80's.
Except for the change in violence and language, all of these shows would do fine in the 80s.
"Serial" shows were well represented at the Emmy Awards in the 80s:
Even Cheers and Murphy Brown had some significant serial nature to the stories. And, the original Battlestar Galactica also had a decent amount of continuing storylines.
I'm not saying that all these shows are great (or even that I, personally, like most of them), but they are definitely more serial in nature. The sticky point (both then and now) is the fine line the creative staff has to tread where there are continuing stories that keep viewers wanting to come back, but not so much that new viewers are unable to jump in and start watching.
So where do I buy an actual panel?
I can buy LCDs of many types from many vendors, but I've yet to see an OLED device. Even transflective LCD displays are hard to come by.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
TV technology ->+
TV content -<+
What the hell does that even mean?
Bow-ties are cool.
Isn't this like incorporating a hard drive and 5.1 surround sound into an 8-track player?
e-books are, by far, the dumbest invention ever made.
I know of very few institutions which use them, and those tend to have captive audiences who only use their "e-libraries" as a very small part of overall services.
The e-book is deader than 8-track. Enough already sony.
Why not go into military development, actually make the "kill stick" fred dreamed up at megatokyo.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Do you watch a lot of Flying Circus?
"including one stunning ultra-portable with no hinge and a single display for both screen and keyboard"
I saw this mock-up (and the other two) and it is the most stupid thing I've ever seen, with one make-believe OLED display that, when the lid of the device was opened, caused the folded-up display to partially unfold to a length that covered the area normally covered by both the display and keyboard of an ordinary portable. Hard to see the point of this, and even harder to type on the display. (No touch sensitivity was indicated, and even then, no physical keys--you would just be typing on a slick, smooth surface with no tactile feedback whatsoever. The first and second runners-up for "most stupid" were the other two mock-ups.
The display that was being folded repeatedly was tiny (duh), about two inches diagonal, and the degree of folding was rather slight, although the picture appeared to remain good. By "appeared" I mean, as best as I could tell given that the display was tiny and in a case which kept the viewer at some distance. Still, if the idea of a roll-up display isn't inherently stupid, i.e., if you want to try to read your screen while it is curved, then this was an interesting demo.
Forget about flexible. Sure, it sounds sexy, but who really cares? The roll-up stuff will probably not withstand normal wear very well in any case.
Why are all the new display technologies like oled and e-paper mainly being marketed on the unimportant qulaities like flexibility?
The real appeal of OLED is the simplicity, i.e. thinness and low cost. Only incrementally from before at first, but the simplicity is really orders of magnitude away from everything else. So once the tech is solid (i.e. good lifetime and low defect rates) and production scaled up, they will be so cheap it's silly.
The real appeal of e-paper is good reflective contrast. i.e not only high contrast, but contrast that gets better in stronger light, and in general better contrast than any screen you have seen. This is something absolutely nothing else can offer right now (electrowetting might eventually, but it's still stricly lab stuff. It promises color, though, so stay tuned on that one). People tend to forget, or not understand, how important this is, even when they talk about books being better to tread than on-screen. But once most peopole have seen a really good one, I think the penny will drop. I wish they'd forget about flexibility and persistence for now and just focus on getting them fast, reliable, cheap and even higher resolution. this is something I'd want on my laptop right now. Work on that other stuff after they've become _good_, and popular.
On oleds I have the impression thay _are_ working on the right stuff, flexible is just a by-product and makes headlines. For e-paper, i'm not so sure.
sudo ergo sum
I know many close minded young people, and many open minded old people. I know some octogenarians that are so open minded they hire hookers, and some young people so close minded they'd call the cops if they saw somebody smoking a joint.
Free Martian Whores!
The OLED flex demo video shows at least two dead pixel rows, and the display doesn't even flex all that much, carefully bending in only one direction. This is very similar performance to "flexible OLED" demos we've seen for the past five years: The tech is so far away from commercial reality it's hardly worth demo'ing on a tradeshow alongside with commercially available tech.
TV content stays the same quality; it's your taste that's changing.
TV's content varys considerably, and always has. Even between episodes of the same series; some of the old Star Treks were inspired ("City on the Edge of Forever" comes to mind), while some episodes were downright embarrasing.
In some ways TV content has gotten better since its "golden days". Back in the 1960s nobody would have dreamed of a comedy without a laugh track, while My Name Is Earl and that one doctor comedy has no laugh track. If you need a laugh track, your comedy isn't funny.
When cable was new, HBO was free, cable channels didn't censor, and cable channels didn't show commercials. Now Comedy Central removes all the funny parts from every movie it shows, and A&E cut "swear words" like "ass" and "shit" before breaking for a commercial. And which channel is it that shows movies with two dumbasses talking about the damned movie before and after commercials? What idiot came up with that idea?
And they didn't have those damned logos in the corner, don't get me started on the animated logos!
In many ways TV has gotten better. It's just that in the 1960s you might have three channels, while now you have dozens of channels of pure crap. When ESPN shows poker and pool you know there are too many sports channels. And who are the dimwits who watch "shopping channels?" And why do I have to pay for them?
Free Martian Whores!
How old are they? I've found virtualbox is great, as is wine. I play Starcraft and Diablo II in wine with no issues whatsoever, and most other things run in Virtualbox ok.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I wonder what the real price of it would be without the Sony (I'm better than any other company so I can charge what I want) markup.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
The oldest I'm actually playing is Road Rash (1995 iirc). Alas, I have some older games I used to love, but they need you to set up the sound card hardware to get sound. I guess I need triple-boot with maybe DOS 6.2.
I really should try Wine.
Free Martian Whores!
Dosbox is surprisingly powerful, too. I've played through some of the old Leisure Suit Larry games on it. Works pretty well :)
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Who needs a TV nowadays? Who even watches TV nowadays? I don't know anybody who really watches TV. They zap when they're veeery bored... only to discover that nothing's on, and well... hang in front of it for no reason, and feeling bad afterwards.
Many don't even have a TV anymore. All the good stuff is available via torrent. And then it goes on my beamer and sound system.
TV, Fax machine, Morse ticker, broadcast (non-internet) radio, paper mail... those are all anachronisms to me. Sorry.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The ultraportable seems nice. But without a tactile input, it's somewhere between an annoyance and completely useless, depending on what you need. Who can afford to look at the keyboard (which is tiny too, so you sure hit the wrong keys every now and then.) when doing real work with it, or playing a real game with it?
Sure it's cool for those mouse-only people. But come on...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Yes, there is a percentage of good shows. This, too, stays constant; there are a hell of a lot of throwaway shows that appeal to a lowest common denominator.
I think the shopping channels may actually pay to be on your dial.
egypt urnash minimal art.