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Sony Unveils Flexible OLED Thinner Than a Hair
Elliot Chang writes "For Sony's newest display, the company decided to throw into the mix ultra-thinness (just 80m or a bit thinner than a human hair) and the energy-saving power of OLEDs. The new prototype is so bendy that it can be wrapped around a pencil while still streaming video!"
Granted, it's the best video quality I have seen wrapped around a pencil, but those artifacts are pretty unacceptable. Are they supposed to be there?
Too bad sony is making it. Guess I will have to wait for a chinese knockoff. No way is sony getting any of my money.
How much?
How big can you get it?
How long will it last?
When will it ship?
You know the kind of important info...
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
As you can now see, it's Slashdot's fault. Apparently someone is too lazy to update the Unicode whitelist with characters that are actually useful on a tech site.
Apparently slashdot won't take the micro symbol in comments. I don't know what is more fail: a board for nerds not allowing the micro symbol in comments or the fact that I didn't properly proofread by one sentence post.
Why do the images of both of those prototypes have lines going all across them? I'd imagine you'd want to demo something like that without that being a side effect - unless it's intentional...? I'm sure someone here knows. :)
I imagine such screens would be useful during the process of manufacture of various gadgets (and after production remaining in one shape, with hard translucent shell around it; otherwise it would be damaged too easily). In that case distortion shouldn't be a problem.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Seriously,
Sunglasses with HUD, Contact Lenses with onscreen displays, Fingernail Applicques a la Cyberpunk. Subdermal vital signs readout, Passports, Driver's Licenses and Credit Cards with really cool security features.
Every book and magazine you wanted to read ever on a 1 or 2 page Ebook reader way thinner than anything we have now. Yeah, batteries and storage will take up some room. At some point the interface, and charging equipment will be the bottleneck to making smaller system.
Wrapping a display around a pencil while it's in use is not especially useful. The point of the demo is that you can have a display that is wrapped around a cylinder and rolled out when you use it. The big advantage that a laptop has over a palmtop now is screen size. A folding keyboard that is big enough to be comfortable can easily fit in a pocket, but you're limited to something like a 4" screen. With an OLED like this, you could have a much larger screen which is simply rolled up when not in use. Eventually, you could have a pocket computer the same form factor as a pen, which you just unrolled wherever you wanted to use it. Connect a wireless keyboard if you want to do a lot of text entry, otherwise use the touchscreen. The system on chip and battery remain in the pen body.
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All i can say from the specs is you'll need a pretty dark room to see anything. The sun has a luminance of about 1 billion cd/m2, fluorescent lamps about 10,000 cd/m2, the iphone-screen has a peak luminance of 428 cd/m2, and this is only 100 cd/m2. (cd=candelabra).Any stronger light-source shining on the picture (or your eyes)=less picture.
That would mean almost all light sources with this tech so far, even reflected light/backlightcan be >100 cd/m2.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I don't know if you (or anyone else) remember the "Global Link" handheld computers in the science fiction series "Earth: Final Conflict". It was a compact device that slid open to reveal what had to be a rolled up screen. Similar to the mockup on this page: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/google-and-sirius-xm-build-my-dream-handheld/9233 I've been waiting 13 years for them to build one.
But when will I be able to buy a reasonable-size and reasonable-price display that uses OLEDs? Lab toys are cute, but real products are sexy.
Apple apparently considered an OLED display for the iPhone 4G but decided against it because of cost and reliability concerns. However, the fact that they even considered it suggests that it won't be all that much longer before manufacturers start shipping OLEDs in actual products.
This ain't rocket surgery.
I guess the answer is “sorta”.
Putting Linux on the PS3 served one single purpose: Revealing to everyone the kind of crap we game developers have to put up with when making games for the damn thing.