Competing technologies - Page 38

Researchers from Samsung Electronics developed the world's first Quantum-Dots emissive full-color display (called QLED). Samsung produced a 4" 320x240 Active-Matrix QD-Emissive display made on both glass and flexible plastic.

QLED display promise to be more efficient than LCDs and OLEDs, and be cheaper to make (Samsung estimates that they will cost less than half of what it costs to make LCDs or OLED panels) - but as of today, QLEDs are less efficient than OLEDs, and also offer about 10,000 lifetime hours at best. It is estimated that it will take at least 3 years to commercialize QLEDs - and obviously by then OLEDs will improve a lot, too.

Samsung released a short video showing the difference between an IPS-LCD (as used in Apple's iPhone 4), a Super AMOLED and the new Super AMOLED Plus:

Super AMOLED Plus displays are an upgrade to Super AMOLED. They use a real-stripe subpixel matrix and not pentile - and so has 50% more sub-pixels. The PPI is a bit larger but Samsung will soon make them at much higher resolutions. Super AMOLED Plus displays are also thinner, brighter and use 18% less energy than the older Super AMOLED displays.

We've got a lot of Super AMOLED Plus news today. Here's a short video comparing the Galaxy S2 (with its 4.3" Super AMOLED Plus display) to a Galaxy S (4" Super AMOLED) and an iPhone 4 (3.5" IPS-LCD). The most apparent thing about the S2 - it's a big phone...

A new study (by UC Irvine’s Department of Population Health & Disease Prevention) discovered that LED light bulbs (inorganic-LEDs) contain unsafe levels of carcinogenic toxins. While LEDs do not contain mercury (like in CFL lamps), they do contain lead, arsenic and other unsafe chemicals. This means that it's dangerous to break a LED bulb, and just extrating those toxins from the earth is a destructive process.

The research found that large LEDs contain more toxins than small LEDs - but even low intensity red LED bulbs contains eight times the level of lead allowed under California state law. They state that while LEDs are great in power efficiency - we still need to find a really safe new light source. Perhaps OLEDs will be the answer?

Back in May 2010 Dupont announced that they can print a a 50" OLED TV in under two minutes, using their new printable OLED materials and a custom-made printer from Dai Nippon Screen Manufacturing Co. Today we learned that Dupont estimates that their new OLEDs will be cheaper than LCDs - by about 40%! Regular OLEDs cost about twice as much  as LCDs to manufacture.

Dupont's new manufacturing process uses a continuous stream of ink (rather than droplets used in 'classic' inkjet design), and moves over a surface at rates of four to five meters per second while patterning a display. The spray-printer developed with Dai Nippon Screen works on Gen-4 substrates (730x920). Dupont is using a common structure for each pixel (red, green and blue) and isn't optimizing each pixel. This is less efficient, but results in faster throughput. 

DisplaySearch says that strong demand for Low Temperature Polysilicon (LTPS) based displays (LCDs and AMOLEDs) will drive rapid expansion of LTPS capacity. Spending on LTPS-equipment is expected to reach $2.4 billion in 2011 (and will decrease in 2012 and 2013).

DisplaySearch says that making AMOLEDs and high-end LCDs like the ones used in Apple's iPhone 4 is only currently possible with LTPS. In 2011, supply of both AMOLEDs and LTPS LCDs are forecast to be extremely tight. Leading panel makers are for the first time ever scaling LTPS technology to Gen-5.5 and larger substrates.

Last week we reported that Sony will unveil two professional OLED monitors at the Hollywood Post Alliance Tech Retreat (14-18 February in Palm Springs, California). Today someone sent us the conference's Demo-Room presentation, and indeed it includes an OLED Demo by Sony - showing a new BVM-E250 - which is a 25" (if Sony will keep its naming convention) professional OLED monitor. Here's the slide:

That's all the info we have currently. It'll probably be a very expensive monitor. The BVM-L231, which is a 23" LCD monitor (and will be shown together with the E250) costs $21,500.

Two days ago we published a story saying that Chimei Innolux seems to be producing AMOLEDs again. We got just word (from a trusted source) that the company actually plans to scrap all OLED plans, and shift all LTPS capacity back to LCD.

This is strange as it seems the company is still recruiting AMOLED engineers and researchers. Perhaps they will shift the current Gen-3.5 OLED plant to LCD, but they still have plans to make AMOLEDs in the future (in the Gen-5.5 plant in Tainan, as stated in the company's presentation).

Samsung announced a new phone - the Galaxy SL. It's very similar to the Galaxy S in fact the only differences are an LCD display instead of the Super AMOLED and a TI OMAP 3630 processor instead of Samsung's own Hummingbird (both 1Ghz processors).

We're not really worried here - we know that Samsung still has AMOLED supply issues (even the Nexus S is shipping with LCD in some countries) - and we know that the new flagship phone (the Galaxy S2?) will have a Super AMOLED Plus displays...

There's an interesting article over at the LATimes about HP's flexible display research. HP has been showing flexible e-paper prototypes for quite a while, and they say they expect to deliver a prototype to the US army by year's end. Carl Taussig, director of advanced display research at HP Labs in Palo Alto, reveals that the company is also working on flexible OLEDs. Flexible E Ink is closer to commercialization - but it is monochrome and not suited for videos, and that's why HP is also looking at OLEDs.

HP's Flexible E Ink display

In October 2010, Universal Display (together with LG and L-3) announced that they delivered 8 flexible wrist-mounted OLED displays for the US Army. These are 4.3" QVGA full-color OLEDs, made on a amorphous-Silicon (a-Si) TFT, fabricated by LG
Display.