ITRI's Image Lighting turns an OLED lighting panel into a static image panel

Taiwan's ITRI institute developed a new technology (which they call Image Lighting) that enables OLED lighting to be patterned with grayscale images (static of course - this is not an OLED display as such).

ITRI says that their technology allows for more than 200 levels of grayscale, which results in great photo quality. ITRI's process is easy and scalable and will fit nicely within a normal OLED lighting production process. ITRI also plans to develop the technology further to enable full color image lighting panels.

Patterned OLED lighting panels have been around for some time, and some companies (such as Philips with their structured OLEDs) are already shipping them commercially. Konica Minolta even showed a panel that has a gray-scale pattern. ITRI says that they have demonstrated this technology for colorful grayscale image in 2009, but using FEEL (Flat Electron Emission Lamp) and not OLEDs. They are now transferring the technology to OLED and, as mentioned before, will be able to do color patterns soon.

ITRI's process works by converting an image into a matrix of dot pixels, in which the dot size is variable, and so gray scale is enabled (the dot pitch is very small). This R&D project is supported by the Bureau of Energy, Ministry of Economics Affairs of Taiwan.