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!"

Comments

80m? Quite a hair.

[John Hasler]

> just 80m or a bit thinner than a human hair

80 meters is a pretty substantial hair.

Video on akihabaranews

[exhilaration]

You can watch the video on akihabaranews

Flexible gadgets are undeniably sexy, eh?

[noidentity]

Flexible gadgets are undeniably sexy

I kept telling her that, but she wouldn't fall for it.

video pencils

[gbjbaanb]

The new prototype is so bendy that it can be wrapped around a pencil while still streaming video!"

and to think, in my day we were happy with a plastic woman whose undies floated off when you tipped it up.

Re:video pencils

[dubbreak]

and to think, in my day we were happy with a plastic woman whose undies floated off when you tipped it up.

Think of how that can be improved on! Just add an accelerometer and it can cue a video of woman stripping when tipped. Shake the pen and it will skip to a different woman (3 stock woman but you can either have a monthly subscription or purchase individual new penstrip avatars for $0.99 each). Algorithms can determine your preferences and suggest new avatars... etc

The future is awesome. It can't come quick enough.

Re:video pencils

[Monkeedude1212]

It can't come quick enough.

I think it just did.

Why does it look so horrible?

[ArbitraryDescriptor]

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?

Re:Why does it look so horrible?

[ArbitraryDescriptor]

Gizmodo has a video. The 'dead' strips seem to change as it get's bent. It's cool.. but that doesn't seem like a problem easily solved.

Re:Why does it look so horrible?

[Anonymous Coward]

For a prototype, though, this is pretty smurfing impressive.

Yeah, too many people here don't seem to acknowledge that this is an early prototype. They're acting like Sony's going to start marketing these things as is in a few weeks or something.

Too bad.

[Merls the Sneaky]

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.

But when?

[michael_cain]

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.

Re:80m? Quite a hair.

[Angst Badger]

80 meters is a pretty substantial hair.

You can't expect much grasp of metric units from Americans. It was bad enough when they used the Imperial system, but nowadays they have only two units of scale: a human hair and the state of Texas. Anything in between is just passed over in embarrassed silence.

Re:80m? Quite a hair.

[Glarimore]

They obviously mean microns, but either don't know the abbreviation or accidently left out a .

Aspect Ratio fix

[aapold]

I like the idea of being able to switch my aspect ratio by stretching the screen.....

Re:80m? Quite a hair.

[Stickybombs]

Not true, we have football fields and libraries of congress as well! He meant to say it is just under 1 football field.

Re:80m? Quite a hair.

[marcansoft]

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.

Re:80m? Quite a hair.

[Glarimore]

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.

Re:80m? Quite a hair.

[oodaloop]

or the fact that I didn't properly proofread by one sentence post

Even more fail would be not proofreading a post commenting on not proofreading.

Re:That's awesome

[Lord Ender]

Well, there are some advantages to distortion. Think the girl in your adult video is a bit too chunky? Just bend the edges of the screen toward you!

45 Comments and no applications

[Tekfactory]

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.

Re:45 Comments and no applications

[Solandri]

Every book and magazine you wanted to read ever on a 1 or 2 page Ebook reader way thinner than anything we have now.

You're thinking in the wrong dimension. This is working towards an ebook reader which you can roll up so you can carry it around in your shirt pocket. Back in ancient times, they rolled up parchment so it would take less storage space. Those scrolls got replaced by books with pages because you needed to keep scrolling parchment to continue reading, and it was easier to flip a bunch of pages than to scroll to the section you wanted.

Ebook readers eliminate the need to physically turn pages, and so once again rolling becomes the most space-efficient storage method.

Re:Get over yourself.

[marcansoft]

Sony pulled a stunt FIVE YEARS AGO.

Try last month. They unconditionally (and probably illegally) pulled out a major feature of the PS3 for all PS3 owners.

Re:80m? Quite a hair.

[Nadaka]

Dont forget our standard unit for fluid flow: hogsheads per acre fortnight.

Re:Get over yourself.

[Lumpy]

Nope. all my panasonic gear has NO sony components in it.

no Sony chips inside. It's one reason why I went Panasonic... they dont use ANY sony parts and are a glass maker on their own as well.

Re:Summary of comments so far

[MRe_nl]

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.

Re:That's awesome

[Garble Snarky]

Or to make devices with retracting/rollup screens, that's what I'm really looking forward to.

Re:Get over yourself.

[doctor_no]

GIve me a break, people that spew this BS haven't actually used Linux on the PS3.

It was NOT a "major" feature, I was on the YDL forums (the most active PS3 Linux community online) and it was a ghost town.

Quite frankly, PS3 on the Linux was useless, it had 256MB or RAM, less then 200MBs were usable, you could hack it to access GPU memory but it was overall pretty much useless. PPU builds of applications were hard to find, you were stuck without Flash (crappy Gnash work around), and old version of Firefox (no HTML5), and any cheap netbook would run circles around it.

The worst part is after 3 years of Linux on the PS3 nobody made any substantial Cell applications. There was barely any community support. Nobody cared.

All these whiners complaining about he loss of Linux of the PS3; where the hell were you when it was available?

Re:80m? Quite a hair.

[Rigrig]

Is really that useful? If you whitelist then should also be allowed, along with , and . Before you know it people will be asking for , or even !

Re:Get over yourself.

[advocate_one]

and people are still unsuspectingly installing rootkits using Sony CDs made several years ago... I have a few CDs I have to hold down the left shift key for when loading them just to be doubly sure...