Competing technologies - Page 48

QD Vision doesn’t yet have a commercial product, but if its development efforts are successful, it could find itself at the center of a revolution in display technology. Current liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and even cutting-edge organic LED, or OLEDs, are illuminated by electricity-thirsty fluorescent backlights and produce muddy, impure shades of red, green, and blue.

By contrast, QD Vision’s quantum dots—tiny semiconductor crystals only a few nanometers in diameter—produce highly pure colors when stimulated by electrons, and require much less electricity in order to glow brightly.

With a laser light engine, colors don’t look so much as if they’re painted on the screen as if they’re shooting out from it. Colors are alive and vibrant in a way that mimics the brightness of neon light, or a large advertising transparency being illuminated from behind in a light box. The company also says that their laser TVs produce twice as many colors as any traditional TV technology. Indeed, many colors on the plasma and especially on the LCD sets were washed out and dull, while their laser counterparts were vibrant, without looking overblown. The picture looks much like a giant version of the images produced by Sony’s superb but tiny OLED HDTV screens.

While Mitsubishi would not talk sizing, pricing, or specs for its LaserVue sets, a casual observation of one of its models indicated that the production version is likely to be about two-thirds as deep as a same-sized DLP rear projection set. That’s still not as thin as an LCD or the really thin OLED TV tech, but it moves toward diminishing the single biggest objection to rear-projection TV.

The story we published two days ago about Panasonic's small Plasma displays was a hoax - an April's first joke. The strange thing - it was actually released on April's third! And frankly - that's not really a funny story, is it?

Read more here (engadget)

Merck expects OLED to complement but not replace liquid crystal technology.

The reality is that OLED will come one day as an additional technology for flat displays. I say this with a lot of confidence," the head of Merck's chemicals business, Walter Zywottek, told Reuters in an interview.

Panasonic has announced it will start construction of a new LCD television factory in August this year that will more than double their production capacity.

The factory would also produce OLED TVs, but only after the 2010 opening and once the LCD production lines are fully operational.

LG.Philips LCD has announced that it will debut what it claims is the world's highest resolution 14.3-inch flexible color E-paper display at CES 2008.

The 14.3-inch E-paper display, which is equivalent in size to an A4 sheet of paper, represents a significant improvement over its predecessors with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels, and the ability to display 16.7 million colors, making it suitable for use in high-end multimedia applications. These displays are extremely energy efficient, only using power when the image changes. Additionally, the displays are extremely thin, at less than 300 micrometers.

Canon has been involved in a patent dispute with U.S.- based Nano-Proprietary Inc., which prevented the Japanese company from putting SED flat-panel televisions on the market in 2007 as originally planned, the newspaper said today.

The company has started the development of a new electron- emitting technology that should be more stable than Nano- Proprietary's, the Asahi said. Canon now aims to mass produce the televisions, according to the report.

Read more here (Bloomberg)

Sony has announced it is to be the latest company to exit the rear-projection television market.

The Japanese electronics giant said it is to focus its future resources on LCD and OLED technology, seeing the flat-screen market as the way forward for consumer's living rooms.

After examining Sony Corp.’s 11-inch Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) television exhibited here at iSuppli Corp.’s Flat Information Displays (FID) 2007 conference last week, there is no denying how stunning the picture is. But at just 11-inches, it’s hard to imagine a family gathering around it to watch a DVD or television show.



But because the OLED-TV market is still in its infancy, with the Sony set being the first to be manufactured and sold to consumers, it’s unreasonable to expect it to compete effectively with Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) or Plasma Display Panel (PDP) televisions at this time. However, this begs the question: Will OLED TV ever be able to match up with LCD and PDP televisions?



It will be a challenge for OLED to catch up, given the investments that have been put into the other technologies, said Paul Semenza, vice president of displays at iSuppli Corp., speaking at FID 2007 last week. But there is no doubt about its performance and there is a lot of potential for the display technology, maybe in mobile applications.



With Sony being the first to throw its hat into the OLED-TV ring, due to its introduction of the 11-inch set this month in Japan at a price of $1,800, shipment volumes are expected to be very small, targeting a small niche of well-heeled, tech-savvy consumers. And even at such a high price, Sony indicated that it is taking a loss on the sale of each OLED set, according to Vinita Jakhanwal, principal analyst for mobile displays at iSuppli.



A few more brands are likely to enter the OLED-TV market in 2009, including Toshiba Corp. and Panasonic Corp. The major motivation for these companies’ entrance into the market is to make a statement to the industry that they are capable of producing OLED TVs, Jakhanwal added.

OLED problems and benefits

• OLED TVs use no backlights, so they offer potential power-savings benefits compared to other technologies.


• Because they have no backlights and use only a single glass substrate, OLED TVs can be very thin.


• The response time for OLED TVs is very fast, so there is no motion blur while watching television.


• OLED TVs have a much richer color gamut than competing display technologies.

Potential is everything

Ceelite is working on large white-light flexible displays. "CeeLites" are just 1/8" thick and use up just 4 watts of power per square foot, but can be made into banners 12 feet long and 30 inches high. Rather than OLEDs, they use light-emitting capacitors that emit electricity into a phosphorescent substrate. They won't be made into high-def TVs anytime soon, but they can be contained in simple plastic, which makes them more easy to bring to market than OLEDs.

Read more here (Gizmodo)