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Hardware

Organic Screens, Coming Soon 100

Posted by timothy from the brighter-futures dept.
InfiniteWaitState writes: "Lighter weight laptops may soon be more affordable and have better displays ... Forget LCD, according to this article in The Economist, soon OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diodes) will be in mass production." These organic screens keep getting promised, but this article says that at least 30 companies now have plans to produce them, and that Sony has some biggish plans for TVs as well as computer screens, as well as a 13" demo model to show off.
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Organic Screens, Coming Soon More

Organic Screens, Coming Soon

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  • Re:how hard is this: (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    quite hard. Considering the largest *prototype* in the world is 13 inches, and you can't buy them.
  • One of the reasons I hate my palm pilot is that it does not use rechargable batteries.

    I really really hate anything where I need to replace part of it on a regular basis.

    It is terrible to generate so much waste, it is a money issue, and also, what happens if the company decides to stop making the replacement parts?

  • See OLEDs in action in San Jose next week (SID) (Score:3)

    by erase ( 3048 ) on Friday June 01, 2001 @08:12AM (#185039) Homepage
    The Society for Information Display is holding their conference in San Jose next week, the largest display technology conference ever in North America.

    As well as floor exhibits from various vendors, there will be a section dedicated to showing off the latest in display technologies (actually working).

    I think tuesday and wednesday the floor is open to the public ($10 at the door, maybe). check out the website for more info: http://www.sid.org
  • Lately the trend is to use the prefix "Bio-" if referring to compounds from living cells, and leave organic to just mean hydrocarbons. For example, the soy-based fuel is "Biodiesel" while "Organic diesel" would be just redundant.
  • So what? Quit using gifs and start using PNG.
  • Have you seen how much mess those refil kits cause when you refill the cartridge and 'something' goes wrong? .. ends up gluing up the whole printer. Having been asked to fix such a problem I just cringe when I see someone mention 'refill kits'.
    My advice is always to just buy the branded replacment as it works out cheaper in the long run from having to buy new printers. Plus it's important to think of refill costs when buying the printer in the first place.
    --
    Delphis
  • Sometimes means also hydrogen and/or oxygen.

  • Re:Separate transistors? (Score:4)

    by DJerman ( 12424 ) <djerman@pobox.com> on Friday June 01, 2001 @03:48AM (#185044)
    IIRC from an earlier article:

    The difficulty of LCD is that you have a transparent substrate, a charge grid below the crystal, a layer of liquid crystal, a ground grid above the crystal and a color grid that changes the white-light display to RGB. Oh, and the glass plates (substrate?) that sandwitch all of this, and the diffuser and backlight. But the big deal is that the glass has to be extremely flat and parallel, and the grids have to all line up, and there can be no closed cells in any of the grids. Fail any one of these and the screen has a dead region (anything visible is death).

    Contrast OLED -- light is provided by the element, so the back panel can be opaque (read: not as fragile). The color is in the element too, so one layer of alignment goes. Finally, with proper design the back electrode can provide ground as well, eliminating another alignment headache, and allowing some play (as long as both + and - make it into the pixel, it lights up, and since there's no grid on top you see it whether it's spot-on or not).

    So reduction in precision (or better performance for equal precision) and the fact that everything can be layered on a single glass sheet (rather than 2 which must be aligned and mounted parallel) makes the error rate potentially lower, as soon as the new equipment reaches the same level of debugg-ed-ness as the LCD equipment.

    Of course, there's still the problem of dye fading and aligning 2 or 3 layers, and that we now want to have larger sheets for larger displays, and that we want to go to plastic to make more durable displays, but hey, researchers gotta eat...

  • Motorola has been using an OLED display on oe of their TimePort models, the 8767, sice August. It is in 3 colors, just each color is in a different region of the screen. Text is green, battery meter is blue, signal is amber, etc. Very bright, just like the LED display on my alarm clock, but much higher resolution. IIRC, it can display 5 lines of text. Here's a link [motorola.com]
  • Jesus fucking Christ man are you completely daft? Organic Light Emitting Diode. Hmm I wonder what in the world THAT PHRASE COULD POSSIBLY FUCKING MEAN? Maybe it is a diode made out of organic material (carbon containing, don't be a jackass and construe organic as living tissue). Well yeah I think that's it. Think of a more resolution versions of those traveling LED signs you see at airports or used as stock tickers. OLED displays are basically the same as those except they have three LEDs per pixel and alot more pixels per inch. This means no backlighting for these displays.
  • Alright well OLEDs consume very little power. Normal LEDs consume very little power even for increadibly bright ones. An entire OLED display (lets say 1024x768 pixels) would consume about a quarter of the wattage as a backlit LCD display of the same size. OLEDs can operate on a very low voltage and have natural capatance which the LCD polarizing switches in LCD displays don't have. And since you're combining several display elements into a single electrical component (a single OLED colour element of a pixel) you've just saved 75% of your production cost not to mention the fact OLEDs can be deposited on the glass (or plastic) surface very easily means they're going to be even cheaper. I don't doubt we'll see 120+ DPI OLED displays in the next two or three years. IBM's 200 DPI LCD screens they made for LLNL will be given a serious technological run for their money. It isn't too much to hope to see OLED displays with print quality resolutions within five years.
  • Have you seen eXistenZ? You need one of those adaptors.
  • So could you tell us, oh forcasty one, what companies will be driving this OLED revolution?

    -AP

  • Blue color life expectancy??? (Score:5)

    by Bryan Andersen ( 16514 ) on Friday June 01, 2001 @12:14AM (#185050) Homepage
    Have they solved the problems with blue OLEDs having a much reduced life expectancy. Last numbers I heard were on the orders of 1000-2000 hours use before fading to much.
  • Guess this means I'll have to put on "protection" before my late night "browsing" activities.

    --
  • When the topic reads 'Orgasmic Screens, Coming Soon'
    --

  • The word "organic" means the substance has carbon in it. That's all. I doubt that the panels would have any more of a health hazard than plastic, another organic material. At any rate, OLED color screens won't last ten years with present technology because the blue OLEDs only last 1000-2000 hours before fading. Hopefully that'll change soon. Heck, ten years ago, the only blue LEDs that existed would last for ten minutes before burning out - after being cooled with liquid nitrogen.

  • One of the hurdles has been the relatively short lifespan of the blue dyes, i.e. 1000-2000 hours, vs. 6000+ for green and 10,000+ for red. While the best solution would be to develop longer-lived dyes, a kludgy workaround is to have more blue pixels than green or red, possibly with three or more blues for every green or red, and alternate which blue pixels you light up. This will even out the runtime on a lot of blue pixels and their lifespans become effectively additive.

    The downsides to this are a) in a GRBBB pixel pattern, 40% of your pixels will be dark at any one time, reducing overall screen brightness and resolution, b) the processing overhead of keeping track of which blue pixels have been lit recently and which have been dark, c) potential problems with screen flicker as the blue light comes from different pixels, and d) spending $100M to develop the necessary technology to work around short-lived blue dyes, only to have some smartass announce a new, long-lived blue dye.

    Hmmmm... now that I've said it out loud, it doesn't sound like such a great idea anymore.
  • Well, sure. The process allows higher resolution, without subpixel rendering. If you're not using subpixel rendering, then any patents (justified or not) on subpixel rendering can't come into play.
  • Maybe, maybe not, but the prior art [grc.com] certainly makes it irrelevant.
  • For those of you too lazy to read the article:

    Current LCD's don't emit their own light, and block 66% of the backlight in them, so they're big bulky and inefficient. The Organics emit their own light, so should be half the weight at 1/3 the power consumption. Organics, at mass production quantities, are projected at about 1/2 the cost of LCD's. They're higher contrast, better resolution, and low self interference as well.

    Finally my laptop won't look all fuzzy all the time!

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • No mod points (I'm sure someone will do me the favor), but I wanted to thank you for a clear and concise explanation.

    Have a good weekend.
  • I want that pen PDA!!! NOW!! Ok, I guess I'll just have to sit here and drool for a while. *sigh*



    Dive Gear [divingdeals.com]
  • I want my screen to be made from Chuck Heston
  • Having watched the development of OLED technology for the past three years (tech forecasting is part of my job), it looks like everything should come together in just about five years (three years ago I was predicting eight). Three main factors-- the size of the current prototypes, the brightness and lifetime of the polymers, and the fabrication techniques-- all have trends that suggest commercial displays at competitive prices in five more years.

    My personal prediction is that in ten years, once the quantities ramp up and the manufacturing techniques are improved, it will be darned hard to buy a CRT, as the OLED flat screens will have displaced them.

  • Actually the feature is more interesting than price: OLED allow doing screens that consume less, and apparently allow doing larger size.

    I don't know about reliability of the OLED manufacturing process, but the TFT LCD cost a lot because there are lot of units thaat gets trashed because manufacturing is unreliable.

    As always, price always lower when time goes, so 20% more now means lot less later, when the product is more widely used and mature.

  • I'm am so sick of carrying my 19" monitor to lan parties, it's so damn heavy and big. Imagine how cool it would be to just carry a tiny headset dispay.

    Plus, imagine having 15 guys sitting around a few tables all wearing headset displays, that would just be so cool. It would look like something from out of Star Trek(or pick your favorite sci-fi).

    With prototypes already made, and so many companies planning on using this stuff, it looks like we may finally get to see these in action. Hopefully the cost will be as cheap as they imply.

  • Yeah, I used to have an Atari Lynx. Great in a dark movie theater before the movie starts. Useless in strong sunlight.

    From what I've seen though (from people carrying around the new Motorola cell phones) these things are pretty usable even in direct sunlight, partially because when they are off they really absorb light quite well so contrast is very good. I doubt that the OLED's would become reflective when 'lit' so a sunny beach might still be out of the question, but at least they aren't as hard to read as the first LED digital watches.

  • Will I have to feed it?
  • Look at me strange for talking to my laptop...
    Laugh at me for spilling (feeding) coffee on my PC
    Tell me I can't have a "date" with my laptop
    heh, Shodan DOES LIVE! ;-)
    Oh.. and the FuFme thing brings a whole swag of new ideas to mind... :-P

  • Right on!

    I expect to be viewing my wall-hanging, flatscreen, OLED digital HDTV with that low-cost, too-cheap-to-be-metered, last mile broadband feed to my home Soon®!

  • Don't get too excited. No light based display is going to be the visual analog of CDs. This is for the good and complete reason that a light based color spectrum would have to include at least some negative values to encompass the entire visible color space. There's an RGB scheme proposed by, IIRC, the IEEE, that includes negative green light to produce the entire range.

    It should be immediately apparent that this isn't on the order of "the human eye can resolve down to a 120/th of a degree at the center of focus" limit on resolution, since, AFAIK, back row at IMAX beats that limit. Resolution is simply (hah) a matter of getting your pixels small enough, or whatever. But you can't solve the negative light problem; how do you emit darkness?

    Sure, it's nice to be getting closer to that color space, but don't get too excited; we're a long way yet from either a pigment and light hybrid, or an new color emulation system. Probably direct nervous stimulation would be easier. (More secure too: let's hope it's harder to Van Eck your eyeballs than a monitor.)

  • One of the other benifits to organic circuitry of any kind (OLEDs included) is that they can be applied chemically, i.e. without heat. Upshot of that is that the substrate doesn't have to be glass. Say goodbye to the single most fragile part of any portable device, down to your HP RPN calculator. And since heat resistance isn't a factor, the substrate could be made flexible, and roll up, for instance. Now the screen can be much larger than the input devices. OLED has so many applications, if they can just their act together, it's staggering.
  • It seems like I hear about these every few months - I remember first reading about them in Focus magazine (UK) 5-6 years ago, and they always seem to be coming "soon", but never getting here because of the problems with them burning out too soon (esp the blue).

    Finally it looks like we might be getting there, seeing as people are actually trying to use them in devices rather than just hypothesising. But I think their imagination is still a bit limited since the potential for these is huge - fancy a HUD in your sunglasses, or a spherical TV screen? OLEDs make this substantially easier to achieve. So c'mon already; I wanna buy!

  • I guess that means they'll actually make it to the UK in a 2-3 years. Then again, I could just brush up on my Japanese and save up the airfare....

    Now, let's see, a, i, u, e, o, ka, ki, ku, etc.

  • Re:Backlights (Score:5)

    by Dr_Cheeks ( 110261 ) on Friday June 01, 2001 @12:50AM (#185074) Homepage Journal
    That's OLED - the LE is short for Light Emmitting, so these devices don't need a backlight since they produce their own light. From what I recall, they're substantially brighter than a typical LCD screen too, so they'd work better outdoors. And they consume less power than a backlit LCD too.

    However, if you're wanting something that changes colour but isn't illuminated you're going to have to look elsewhere I'm afraid - these don't work like LCDs. Hope this clears things up a bit.

  • 20% more doesn't seem very expensive... if a 17" LCD can be had for $1000, getting such cool new tech for an extra $200 is not a bad deal.

    --

  • This will expose the informational bancruptcy of current image formats like the year 2000 exposed COBAL.
    Exactly what would you know about this, and what's so difficult about C-O-B-O-L?

    A person whose knowledge of "programming" comes entirely from Dilbert comics is a frightening thing. Please drive thru, sir.

    --

  • I found your post "Insightful". The problem that these people have is that you used the word "backlight", which presumes that the light source is separate from the actual display device. There are at least tens of thousands of readers here, so don't be so hard on yourself. Some people got it.

    As to whether these things will work in outside conditions, I didn't see anything hinting at a yes, so you're right, we may have to wait for the following generation of displays or some future improvements. Cheers,

    Mike.


  • > While this article manages to hype a currently non-exsistant product

    I believe OLED's are being used in the new Motorola Timeport which is already in stores. Though its monochrome, its still an OLED. For a more technical look at OLED,TOLED, etc.:
    Univeral Display Corp. [universaldisplay.com]

    Check out the Transparent OLEDs!
    cheers,
    metric
  • From the linked Economist article:

    "In its Timeport line of telephones, Motorola has already incorporated an OLED display made by Pioneer Electronics of Japan

  • I won't be really happy until I see an organic screen for a desktop system at say... 19 inches.

    Ha!

    I'm waiting for the printed onto paper onees, then I can paper the wall of my office. Almost enough room for the number of xterms and emacs windos I keep open.
    _O_

  • Now! I have seen them on alot of phones in Japan. Motorola also has a phone out now the appearantly uses an OLED screen. BTW the screens are beautiful . A tiny little screen slightly larger than a postage stamp, yet very bright and easy to read.
  • Those articles you mentioned are for LEDs not OLEDs which are a bit different.
  • err, calm down.

    I think the questioner knows this. What they are saying is that with current display tech, the backlit ones eat prohibitively large amounts of battery for many applications (why the Gameboy kicked the Lynx and Game Gear all over the shop - it was the only one that didn't go through batteries at a rate of knots). Also, to quote them "Non-backlit look better in natural light than a backlit screen in optimal conditions ".

    What the question here is is, while this OLED display is a great replacement for anything that uses a backlit display, does the LE part mean that it will use more power or look bad in comparison to a non-backlit normal display.
  • "both film and digital cameras record colors outside the range of the crt"

    Now, I'm naive enough that I may have just been trolled about that 4th primary colour gag, but am I right in thinking you're referring to the fact that our current 24-bit colourspace doesn't allow for the vast range in possible brightness values in the real world? If so, then you'll need to speak to the graphics card and OS people as well as the monitor manufacturers here, surely?
  • Thanks for the info - I might do some more digging. I know that CRTs won't display everything, but I was wondering if this is purely a property of the 24-bit colour space, or if there are colours within that space that a monitor cannot show properly.
    To bring this back on topic, as these OLEDs appear to be standard r,g,b triplets is there any chance that they would have this increased space?
  • My momma always told me that there's no such thing as a stupid question.

    So here goes:

    What do they mean by organic? When I think organic I'm thinking living things like animals and plants. Are these organic light-emitting diodes coming from living things? How can they emit light? I see they're taking about carbon-based molecules. Is that what they mean by organic?

    Can someone explain this to me?

  • OLEDS? Check out Organic Magnets!! (Score:3)

    by trip11 ( 160832 ) on Friday June 01, 2001 @05:29AM (#185087) Homepage
    One of the physics professors here at Ohio State has been working on the OLED's for years. Now his reasearch is moving to organic magnets. Yes, I mean carbon based magnets!! And you can do some REALLY funky things with them too(like change magnetic properties by shining lasers on them). Check out http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~ppl/ to see some of his reasearch.

  • OLEDs and ClearType (Score:3)

    by ortholattice ( 175065 ) on Friday June 01, 2001 @04:28AM (#185088)
    If I understand correctly, full-color pixels [spie.org] are possible with OLEDs rather than 3 separate RGB pixels. Would this make Microsoft's eBook ClearType patent irrelevant?
  • While this article manages to hype a currently non-exsistant product, and promise several cool features, it is decidedly lacking in the 'tech department. How far along are they if they can't provide any actual details on the weight, performance, etc?

  • About 5 years ago, I had a friend of mine working for this company maintaining there servers. One of the machines they has, was a Compaq. For about 6 months, they had non-stop read errors when trying to read there raid system. Compaq sent out ~20 techs to take a look at it, none of them where able to figure out what was failing. One day, my friends father was in there, and noticed one of the chips appear to be offset from the rest of the chips on the card. (SCSI raid card) They ended up figuring out that Compaq used an organic flux that wasn't wiped off properly. And started growing and walking away. Which was very odd.

    My question is, will we see things like this with the OLCD panels ? Will our entry laptops start getting "fuzzy" after there 10 years old. Since its organic, are there possiable fugture health hazards ? Maybe I don't fully understand these displays, but it scares me either way :)


    until (succeed) try { again(); }
  • Has anyone been able to find out a comparative refreshrate/response time difference between these and the current crop of LCD's?
    That's the main thing standing in the way of me buying one of these...I would save up my dough and blow it on a spanky new 22" LCD screen with a digital interface to go with that new GeForce3 card...Just as soon as there's a decent game that NEEDS the card, and as soon as that game doesn't look Like a blurry watercolor on the monitor if you choose to spin around!
    It's a shame, but CRT's still win there...

    Anyone know how Plasma is coming along?
  • Spread the OLED seeds, add water, and watch it grow.....
  • None of both is correct. CO2 and carbonates tend to be covered by inorganic chemistry. Molecules in living cells can be inorganic too (think of alcohol-(ethanol) in your blood :-) )
    So , the definition we get at school is: " any substance that contains the element carbon, with the exception of carbon dioxide and various carbonates".
    but I suspect any meeting of chemists could quibble about the boundary for years...
  • correction: ethanol is organic
  • Exactly: carbon-based molecules
    Some organic polymers exhibit semi-conducting properties. Simple OLEDs are manufactured by sandwiching an appropriate polymer layer between two (transparant) electrodes.
  • they do use billions of transistors in CPU's you know...
  • why does it die youung? im confused..
  • This press release from Toshiba [toshiba.com] (brought to my attention by this article on CNet [cnet.com]) is probably what prompted the Economist story:

    "One of the world's major manufacturers of LCDs, Toshiba announced on Wednesday its first prototype of a polymer OLED display that supports 260,000 colors. The 2.85-inch display is targeted for production in portable devices, such as cell phones and handheld computers, in April 2002."

  • Yes, OLED sounds like it will make new form factors possible. I have read about the possibility of rolling up an OLED display, how about stretching it? Wouldn't it be cool to have a TV screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio that can stretch to 16:9 for widescreen content?
  • Has anyone been able to find out a comparative refreshrate/response time difference between these and the current crop of LCD's?
    This article [zdnet.com] at ZDNet includes a quote that
    In the long run, OLEDs could be less expensive, brighter, thinner and
    play video better than LCDs.
    (Barry Young of DisplaySearch, whoever the hell they are. My emphasis, BTW).

  • Deja vu... (Score:4)

    by Mik!tAAt ( 217976 ) on Friday June 01, 2001 @12:12AM (#185101) Homepage
    A passage from Dream Theater - Scenes from a Memory:

    I just can't help myself
    I'm feeling like I'm going out of my head
    Uncanny, Strange Deja Vu
    But I don't mind- I hope to find the truth
    Now where did I see this before? Oh yes, here [slashdot.org] and here [slashdot.org].

  • Also, the charge controlling each pixel is insulated from that of its neighbours, so pixels do not interfere with one another. Doesn't this imply that each pixel will still have to have a separate transistor? I thought that was what made LCDs so difficult to manufacture in large sizes. Are they hoping that by not having to use a transparent substrate, the fabrication will be simplified?

  • Right, I know what it stands for. I even stated later in the post that OLED does not solve the backlit dilemma, because its purpose is to emit light. Sheesh. I even got modded down, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because of the negative follow up comments from people that failed to read my entire post?

    I brought up an interesting problem with LCDs that despite all of our technical advances still needs to be solved. I thought readers might take interest. Guess not.

  • Backlights (Score:3)

    by infiniti99 ( 219973 ) <justin@affinix.com> on Friday June 01, 2001 @12:40AM (#185104) Homepage
    These OLED displays sound cool, and it's nice that they are faster than LCD, but do they solve the old backlight problem? This is the main problem with LCDs today, not speed. Currently, an LCD is either backlit (laptops, Sega Game Gear) or non-backlit (some digicams, Gameboy Color/Advance). There are advantages/disadvantages to each, mainly that:
    • Backlit consume more power
    • Backlit require no external light source
    • Backlit has glare issues (try using a laptop on the beach sometime)
    • Non-backlit require a light source
    • Non-backlit look better in natural light than a backlit screen in optimal conditions
    • Non-backlit consume WAY less power (probably the reason that Nintendo Gameboy is as popular as it is today)
    Maybe someday it will be possible for a screen to be backlit or non-backlit depending a toggle. Or maybe just a photosensor to make the decision automatically. As it stands, laptops are almost worthless outdoors and Gameboy sucks in the dark.

    From the article it seems like OLED is for backlight-only type devices (since they emit light) so maybe we'll have to wait for the next train before this problem is solved.

    -Justin
  • (-1, redundant)

    I posted this last time we had an OLED article, but for those who missed it:
    Kodak has been working on OLED for a while... [kodak.com]

  • Simply replace red-green-blue triplets with red-green-blue-blue quads and you've doubled the blue life.

    One of the manufacturers also has a white OLED so you don't need to mix in blue to get white.

    If you can do the resolution and don't mind the complexity. Why not have loads of different colours (a complete rainbow) in the display, then when you burn out a native colour, just sythesize it from others. (OK so its a dumbass idea, I was just shooting the breeze).

  • I have a sony vaio with a busted screen ( the xg29 if you care) and I want to replace it with one of these, would it be possible to retrofit it?


    The Lottery:
  • As that is true I was wondering what type of video adapter would be nesscary. In otherwords my lcd plugs into my laptop with a "your guess is as good as mine" plug, will these displays be compatible?
    Or will you need to drive them in a different way? More power? Less power? etc?


    The Lottery:
  • So basically, it's light emitting plastic. Is this the same technology found in the blinking watches, bracelets, etc. found at www.ravertoys.com, and in all those Indiglo(TM) or Limelight(TM) night lights?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I believe i read in an old (about a year old) popular science issue that the military is testing these displays, and planning on deploying them in the field in favor of lcds, due to their resistance to glare and their low power consumption.
  • I suppose this means shadow-boxing is out of the question for you then, eh?
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  • timothy is right. These things keep getting promised, but not happening. I saw stuff about OLED's in Pop. Sci. like two years ago. The Economist is a magazine that is geared towards the world economy news. It's hardly a 'tech' mag. The only reason I can see that timothy posted this stale story is 'cause he must be anxious to see OLED laptops or gigantic, affordable widescreen HDTV's. Otherwise, this news is stale.
  • Ehm, I saw this non-existant product displaying some movie at CeBit in Hannover this spring. Great colours, good contrast, no smear, very thin package and very existant..

    Granted though that it probably isn't finished as a sellable product yet. There's always a lot of work to be done between prototype and market..

    Personally I'll wait until the second or third generation before I get me a 50" OLED-monitor to hang on the wall. By then the quality has gone up and the price has come down...

  • Organic is interpreted differently by different scientists in different fields. Some would define organic as "molecules only containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and/or sulphur" others as "molecules derived form molecules/compounds that are present in living cells". Other definitions are also possible. So which one is it?

    If this article uses the first definition, it think you should have a look at the Philips [philips.com] homepage. There's a piece about their PolyLED [philips.com] (Polymer Light Emitting Diodes) displays.

  • So when can we expect genetically modified screens? They can't be far behind...

  • Further Reading (Score:3)

    by robbyjo ( 315601 ) on Friday June 01, 2001 @12:05AM (#185117) Homepage

    You can find additional info about OLED here [macworld.com] and here [dpreview.com]. They said: OLED production is currently 20% more expensive than LCD (!). But if a "highly productive" fabrication can ramp up, it will cut the cost.

  • Last December I helped a few people at my job get some decent HP printers for $20 bucks a pop. The replacement ink cartridges (sp?) cost more thatn the printer, which came with a set of cartridges. I guess if you have a $300 printer...
  • Using the word organic threw me off...from dictionary.com:

    organic (ôr-gnk)
    adj.
    7. Chemistry. Of or designating carbon compounds.

    Whew, what a relief. Confusion with Definition 1: (Of, relating to, or derived from living organisms: organic matter.) gets me thinking that I'd have to water or feed my monitor!
    Maybe I can gather about 500 fireflies and create a old Burroghs Green screen terminal...
    Does anyone have a link to the actual process?
  • That is why manufacturers put this baby in the 3G cellular phones. The size of the phone bill will keep the usage of the LED screen down. After 1000-2000 hours usage probably in one or two years a new model 3G phone appears cheaper and loaded with features. So OLED could be used even the life-span is short.
  • Organics rocks, but it dies young.

    If its perfect, you'll see manufacturers rolling out LCDs like toilet paper.

    I think these factories should mass produce the OLED and make it a disposable item. When the light goes dim, roll it up and put in a new one.

  • Darn! You beat me to it. I was going to ask this question.

    But to provide some meaningful dialog....One of the previous articles on this topic mentioned the future possibility of creating a display screen by ink-jetting the organic dyes onto paper or some other flexible substrate. If they really found a low-cost way to do this, and you could buy a new "screen" at, say, the price of a cell-phone rechargeable battery, would the lower lifetime matter as much? You could just buy a new screen ever 2 - 3 months. Not that I advocate this as a "totally acceptable" fix, but I was curious as to how others feel.

    GreyPoopon
    --

  • 3 I believe - red, green, and blue...
    --
  • I won't be really happy until I see an organic screen for a desktop system at say... 19 inches. Than I'll get all hot and bothered and buy one. Until then there's no reason for a gamer to care, it's just cool for laptop users. A 19-21 inch OLED with that awesome resolution they say it has plus less power consumption and friggin weight than my current moniter (big-ass CRT) mmmmmmmm *drools* that would be perfect for a desktop system; that's what I'm waiting for as far as monitors go.
  • Genetically engineer nuerons to produce light like these "carbon-based compounds" and you end up with a monitor that can think! Forget CPUs, I want my brain-screen!
  • HELL no! And they won't either. Have you not heard of planned obsolescence. It's a trick that the big companies use. The make a product at half the cost that will only last 1/4th the time. It keeps them in business. No, the "solution" will be cheap replacement monitors.

    As a side note, have you noticed how hard the inkjet manufacturers fight the cheap refill market. You know, the kits that come with a bottle of ink and a syringe. I picked up a kit last night. For 2/3 the cost of a new HP45 black injet cartridge, I got the material to refill the one I had 5 times. The HP cartridge has a small metallic ball shoved into a syllicon lined hole to seal the ink in, and the kit comes with a plug for the hole. Guess what? HP has changed the size of the hole so that the plugs don't fit. Coincidence? I had to file the head of a screw flat to make my own plug. (Take that HP!!)

    Companies would love a 'monitor' that you had to replace once a year. It would do wonders for THEIR bottom line. Of course, this being a capitalist society, look for someone harping a solution on TV that will "extend the life" of your monitor by converting the color blue to a mixture of red and green.

  • Actaully the Blue LED problem has been recently solved by a scientist in Japan. details are here [interesting-people.org] and here [atip.org]. These are the same document, the second is just pre tagged text.

  • No light based display is going to be the visual analog of CDs.

    Todo, I don't think we're in kansas any more.

    LED's may not provide negative green light or the fourth primary color, but they will definately introduce a much larger colorspace and every jpg, bmp, gif image etc. is going to be caught with its bits down.

    Cave dweller's never fear - your shadows are safe here, just wear these glasses and you'll be safe. Take off the shades though and you're looking at a horse of a very different color.

    This colorspace is important because it's the first major incompatability/split on the display/print side. Previously colorspace was an problem only for publishers because paper, LCD, and CRT all have a roughly compatable colorspace. Not so LED.

    Some of us will expect to see a difference between the fire and the fire engine.

  • With LED, power consumption is related to number of lit pixels; black is once again your friend.

    Need I say more?

  • A New Color Space! (Score:4)

    by AmericanInKiev ( 453362 ) on Friday June 01, 2001 @03:14AM (#185131) Homepage
    LED's have a *much* larger color space. This will expose the informational bancruptcy of current image formats like the year 2000 exposed COBAL.

    When transistors and thus portable AM radios arrived, music mixes were carefully tailored to sound good through tiny speakers and narrow bandwidth transmission. Likewise almost all of the images we see on computers today have been tailored to look good on the inferior bandwidth or colorspace of the crt. Thus we have aquired the sloppy habit of throwing out all the information that we cannot currently display and/or using software which does.both film and digital cameras record colors outside the range of the crt

    When the audio CD format was developed, it was designed to embrace the human ear (5 - 22,000 Hz) even though very few systems can achieve this range. Perhaps now we will see wide-spread adoption of human-centric images (i.e. Web browsers which can open PhotoCD files into the colorspace of the attached display.) Be it a greyscale WAP (for "What A Phony"), CRT, or FullColor (LED).

  • They said: OLED production is currently 20% more expensive than LCD (!). But if a "highly productive" fabrication can ramp up, it will cut the cost.

    Right...just like anything else, as soon as economies of scale kick in, the price drops. 17" CRTs just a few years ago were over $1000, but now that they're pretty much standard equipment, you can pick one up for $200 or sometimes even less.

    LCD displays have been coming down in price as well...retail desktop units used to be well over $2000 and now you can get them from under $1000. The same will happen with portable OLED displays.

  • I did find the pictures informative. I believe we have a long way to go before these are really usefull. The display may be small and efficient, but the frickin bolts they use to hold the thing on are decidedly heavy looking [nlo-serv.ethz.ch].

  • Good Times Virus (Score:4)

    by deathcow ( 455995 ) on Friday June 01, 2001 @12:42AM (#185134)
    I hear there will be a flexible membrane on the front of these monitors (and televisions) where you can dose the organic LCD matrix with a hypodermic needle full of McAfee antiviral compounds.

    It will be critical for desktop technicians to carry plenty of clean needles.
  • Toshiba announced [toshiba.co.jp] it developped a prototype oled screen, using ink-jet technology.


    Machinefabriek Verborg - Machinebouw [verborg.mbit.nl]
  • "The efficiency is currently 1 candela per ampere for red, 10 cd/A for green and 2.5 cd/A for blue."
    Hmm, if it's so easy to get green out of these things, will we see cheap monochrome green text/black background screens? Just like the old terminal days!

    --Kevin

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