Competing technologies - Page 25

On March 2014 Motorola showed their first smartwatch, the beautiful Moto 360, and it will launch it on September 4th. It was widely speculated that it adopts an OLED panel - especially as it is always on and the battery drain on an LCD will be quite large.

But today Best Buy posted a product listing by mistake (they took it off-line a short while later) which revealed the Moto 360 specifications: and it uses a 1.5" 320x290 round LCD panel. This is quite a disappointment, I really hoped this beautiful time piece has an OLED display.

Samsung released their financial results - and it was not a good quarter for the Korean company. While they earned $6.1 billion, both mobile phone and tablet sales were weaker than expected (Samsung shipped only 8 million tablets, compared to 13 million in the previous quarter).

Samsung Display's OLED earning were actually good - increasing slightly driven by new high-end smartphones. SDC is increasing AMOLED sales to mid-range phones.

On March 2014, Sony unveiled the Morpheus VR HMD system, specifically designed for the PS4 console. The original prototype system shown by Sony used a 5" Full-HD (1920x1080) LCD panel (Oculus's VR system uses a Full-HD OLED).

It'll take a while for Sony to release this as a product (they say it won't happen before the end of 2014) - but there are now reports that Sony is changing the display to a 2560x1440 OLED display (1280x1440 for each eye). Like Oculus, Sony probably wants a low-persistant display as LCDs simply aren't up to par with OLEDs in that regard.

In January 2014, Sharp unveiled 7" WXGA MEMS-based displays, promising to release them within six months. Last week during the SID conference, Sharp unveiled new prototypes, saying that they will start shipping those displays in Q4 2014 (yes, still half a year away).

Sharp's display use an IGZO backplane and MEMS technology developed by Pixtronix (a subsidiary of Qualcomm). The 7" 1280x800 panels offer a color depth of 24 bits and a 122% NTSC color gamut. Sharp says that this display is very power efficient - with full color it consumes less than half the power an an LCD panel. A monochrome display will use 1/10 of the power used by an LCD.

In 2012 we posted about light-emitting electrochemical cells (LEC), a cheaper (but less efficient) flexible alternative to OLED lighting. Back then, three Universities (in Sweden and Denmark), involved with Polymer LEC (P-LEC) research, launched a company called LunaLEC to develop and commercialize the technology.

Now LunaLEC unveiled a new technology that can be used to fabricate 3D LECs in air using spray-spintering. This fault-tolerant fabrication technique can produce multi colored large-area emission patterns via sequential deposition of different inks based on identical solvents. The technique can also be used to deposit LECs on complex-shaped surfaces - for example the fork you see above. This is done in-air without the use of cleanrooms.

Update: According to a UK magazine, Sony denies pulling out of the OLED TV market

In December 2013 Sony and Panasonic announced that they canceled their OLED TV joint-development effort. The two Japanese companies said they will continue to develop OLED technologies independently. Now the Japanese Nikkei Asian Review reports that Sony decided to halt their OLED TV development to focus on UHD LCDs.

Sony 56-inch OLED TV Prototype

According to the report, Sony does not see any real demand for OLED TVs any time soon. While they may be right in the very near term (1-2 years), this is a very risky decision because if OLED TVs do take off in 2015 or so as Sony will again be too late to the new TV technology (the same mistake they did with LCDs).According to some reports, Sony aims to enter the OLED TV market using LGD panels, a strategy that didn't quite work out for Sony with LCD panels a few years ago.

Japan's Nikkei Asian Review posted yesterday that Samsung Electronics decided to scrap their plans for an OLED TV fab. The company is still facing production yield problems and decided to focus on high quality LCDs for the "time being". Samsung will continue its OLED TV research of course.

This is not really news. Samsung pretty much confirmed this back in January 2014, and the company seems to have decided to let LG take the OLED TV market for the near future. It seems that LG's choice of technology (WRGB and Oxide-TFT) was better than Samsung's (direct emission and LTPS) - but of course it's too early to pick the winning company as next-gen technologies (such as ink-jet printing) are maturing and will hopefully be adopted in the future.

There are reports that Apple acquired private stealth company LuxVue Technology. LuxVue is developing a micro-LED based display. The company raised $43 million in VC money.

There's very little information available about LuxVue or its technology. And obviously we don't know anything about Apple's plans for this technology.

Japan Display's OLED R&D manager Masahiko Suzuki discussed the company's AMOLED program during a conference in Japan. Masahiko explains (see slide below) that for the medium-term, the small/medium display maker is focused on high-res LCD panels (over 500 PPI), but for the long term the main focus will be on OLED displays.

JDI sees OLED as a way to create a new market for flexible, transparent and roll-to-roll printed displays. JDI is set to develop flexible OLEDs and later on high-resolution OLEDs. JDI is using LG's WRGB technology which enables them to achieve a high resolution and a lower power consumption on mainly-white images (such as a web browser). But currently JDI sees OLEDs as still too expensive, and there are still issues with lifetime and uniformity.

LG's G Flex is cool - the first flexible OLED device that actually flexes a bit. But it's not the world's first flexible device. Back in 2012, Russian company called Wexler released the Flex One flexible e-reader that was the first device (and only one?) to use LG's flexible plastic based E Ink panel (6", XGA 1024x768).

Anyway, the Flex One was later discontinued, but now I found it Amazon.com - for only $49.99. So here's your chance to own this little flexible e-reader and a little piece of display history. I played with this little device back in 2012 during SID 2012. It's quite shatterproof - and very light - and flexible and somewhat very plasticy: