Flexible, Color OLED Screens For E-Readers

nadiskafadi writes "Taiwanese researchers have shown off several flexible display technologies in an endeavor to promote e-readers and e-paper. One of the newest technologies from the Industrial Technology Research Institute was a flexible 4.1-inch color OLED (organic light emitting diode) display, which it claims is for the next era of portable devices."

Comments

The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E.

[Oscar_Wilde]

Oh for goodness sake!

The last thing you want in an e-reader is for it to be light emitting. There's a reason we're putting so much effort into developing better eInk displays.

The only people who don't seem to understand this are the ones who don't read much or haven't read much on an eInk screen. It's a huge improvement over anything that works by shining light directly into your eyes.

Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E.

[Dan East]

Yeah, I've always wondered about that. If you go back a mere 130 years, the only sources of emitted light a person would ever see (off the top of my head) were:

Sun
Fire
Stars
Lightening
Auroras
Lightening bugs, etc
Foxfire, etc
Fish (or were they too deep then?)

So everything the human eye ever saw was reflected light. Since the advent of the television, people began watching and focusing on emitted light directly, and computers, cell phones, etc have taken that even further.

So what, if anything, does that mean to human vision?

Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E.

[Ifandbut]

Well, until we can get E-ink displays to reflect color instead of just gray scale then our only option is light emissions biased displays.

Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E.

[bertok]

Yeah, I've always wondered about that. If you go back a mere 130 years, the only sources of emitted light a person would ever see (off the top of my head) were:

Sun
Fire
Stars
Lightening
Auroras
Lightening bugs, etc
Foxfire, etc
Fish (or were they too deep then?)

So everything the human eye ever saw was reflected light. Since the advent of the television, people began watching and focusing on emitted light directly, and computers, cell phones, etc have taken that even further.

So what, if anything, does that mean to human vision?

Absolutely nothing, light is light, irrespective of the source.

Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E.

[camperdave]

Don't forget Humphrey Davies' invention, the incandescent light bulb. It's over 200 years old, or his other invention, the carbon arc lamp, also 200 years old. Although, would the arc lamp be considered lightning?

Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E.

[Fallen Seraph]

There's something noticeably absent from that list: the Moon. The moon was mankind's primary source of light before the advent of fire, and the moon can be very bright at times. Yet the moon's light is entirely composed of reflected light. The poster above you is correct: light is light, irrespective of the source. The key aspect is how bright the light is. Staring at the sun is bad, not because it's a light source, but because it's a POWERFUL light source which is much brighter than our eyes are capable of handling directly. With many modern devices, brightness can be varied for increased eye comfort and reduced strain.

That being said, the issue is that, often, reducing brightness also reduces contrast on light emitting devices. And when the brightness is high, it can wash out the darker colors, and make details hard to see because the light overwhelms it. Thus E-Ink is useful not because it's not a light source, but because it is a low brightness (when reading under reflected light) high contrast display, which uses almost no energy when the display is static, making it perfect for long-term reading.

Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E.

[Miseph]

Not if I can see it in a mirror.

Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E.

[drinkypoo]

No it isn't. Arc lamps feature an actual electric arc, but in a fluorescent light the gas is simply stimulated to the point where it emits photons, most of which are in the UV range. Then they strike the phosphor coating, exciting it to the point where it emits its own photons, which unlike those from the gas in the tube consist mostly of visible light. While a filament lamp heats the filament itself until it glows, releasing photons which are in the visible range, the light from an arc lamp is produced when the arc itself occurs, and no phosphor layer is required.

In other words, no, an arc lamp is totally different from a fluorescent lamp in every way besides having a glass container filled with a non-air gas, including the physical mechanism by which light is produced.

Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E.

[mark-t]

Light may be light, irrespective of the source, but we process visual information not merely by number of the photons that reach our eyes, but also largely by the differential between them in adjacent points in an image... thus, a light emitting display appears washed out by a brighter light source because it cannot produce enough light of its own to produce useful contrast in the region of interest (the display). Even though such a display itself may be perfectly illuminated by sunlight physically, the information that one might have wanted to obtain from it remains illegible.

Reflective displays and surfaces do not exhibit this problem. No display that depends entirely on emitting light of its own to create a viewable image can ever hope to address this issue.

Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E.

[Bigjeff5]

Anybody who knows how flourescent bulbs actually work will tell you that the gas inside becomes a plasma. As a plasma, the gas conducts electricity, which pretty much precludes it from being an arc of electricity (though it does start as an arc, it's complicated).

To create an arc, the electric current must make a jump from a conductive electrode across a non-conductive space to another conductive electrode. The electricity super-heats the gas as it makes the jump, causing it to glow. This process actually does produce small amounts of plasma, but an arc lamp maintains the arc, while a flourescent lamp maintains the plasma. Arc lamps, I believe, tend to be a lot more power hungry than flourescents, because once in the plasma state much less electricity is needed to maintain the flourescent lamp. The gas in an arc lamp is always non-conductive, while the gas in a flourescent lamp becomes conductive. See?

A failing ballast may well produce a relatively constant arc of electricity by creating irregular spikes in current, which don't allow the plasma to fully form, but this is not the same as what happens in a functioning flourescent lamp.

Does anyone know...

[wizardforce]

Did they ever solve the problem that older, flexible, OLED displays had that caused visual distortion as the OLED display was bent or is this still an issue?

Call me when they make OLED toilet paper

[BigDXLT]

Then, I could give every single frame of each Uwe Boll movie the respect it deserves.

Ah yes...

[denzacar]

The "I am the center of the Universe and all should conform to my unimaginative desires" approach.
Damn! I wish I came up with that philosophy first.

Gee.. Who would ever want a thin flexible display that could be bent or rolled up? Madness! Madness I say!
Naah... let's just make displays that are big enough and cheap enough for YOUR needs.

Re:No! Larger please.

[The Evil Couch]

Why is it they have to step forwards to color already? What I want is much larger greyscale displays with better contrast for cheaper. Seriously, give me a U.S. Letter size display with better contrast for under $100 and I will jump on the e-reader bandwagon.

Because that's a false dichotomy? They're going to need to go color eventually and there's no reason that research into both cheaper, bigger monochrome displays and color displays can't be done simultaneously.