Blue light hazard and OLED displays - Page 3

Earlier this month, we reported that Taiwan's WiseChip is entering the OLED lighting market with plans to produce candle-light emitting OLEDs using technology developed at Taiwan's National Tsing-Hua University.

Wisechip already started to produce sample panels, and the first ones were setup in an aboriginal village as street lights - embedded inside a bee-hive like mask taken from rotten wood. This tribe, Tai-Yah (also called Atayal), has been without electricty until 1979 (they were known as the "dark tribe"), and currently the use CFL street lights, but rejected a suggestion by the government to install LED lights.

A senior VP at LGD recently declared in the IMID Display Business Forum in Korea that according to measurements done by the company, LCD screens emit 3.1 times more blue light than OLED screens. The measurements were done 120 cm away from TVs, 60 mm from monitors and 30 cm from smartphones (TVs are larger and emit more blue light than other types of screens).

Blue light is high energy visible light, widely acknowledged to bear harmful effects like discomfort to the eye and damage to the retina, as well as serve as a contributing factor to diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and insomnia. Children seem to have delicate retinas that are highly susceptible to the dangers of blue light.

Taiwan's PMOLED maker WiseChip Semiconductors is entering the OLED lighting market. The company licensed technology developed at Taiwan's National Tsing-Hua University. WiseChip's new technology enables OLED lighting panels that emit light akin to candle light - with a high CRI (93) and a vision-friendly 1,914K.

WiseChip aims to start OLED lighting mass production towards the end of 2014 or in early 2015. They say that these OLEDs do not emit high Kelvin blue light which is hazardous to eyes and also carcinogenic.