Quantum Dots - Page 12

My friend Raymond Soneira from DisplayMate wrote an interesting article for the SID Information Display magazine on Tablet displays technologies in real world ambient light. The displays obviously progressively degrades as ambient light is increased, and Raymond then shows how you can compensate and correct images by by dynamically modifying the color gamut and intensity scale.

The article points out the importance of using a managed wide color gamut in displays. Here OLEDs (and also LCDs with Quantum Dots) have an advantage obviously over regular LCDs. This basically means that by having a wider color gamut, a display can be made to look better under ambient light.

Back in May 2012, 3M teamed up with Nanosys to commercialize QDEF Quantum Dot films for LCD displays. Today 3M announced that it is in the "final stages of scale-up" for these QDEF films. They plan to offer these to LCD makers that can be use them to make phones, tablets and TVs lighter, brighter, more energy efficient and with a larger color gamut. 

In January 2013 Sony unveiled some new LED-backlit LCD TVs under the Triluminos brand, which use QDvision's quantum dot films. This TVs (and smaller sized LCDs in one of Sony's digital cameras) are already shipping.

QD Vision announced that they raised $20 million that will be used to ramp up Quantum-Dots film production capacity. This latest round of financing includes support from all existing investors. QD Vision's Color-IQ product (QD film that enhances LCD's color gamut) is used in Sony's Triluminos LED-backlit LCD TVs and in some of their digital cameras LCD displays as well.

QD Vision says that their Color IQ film can enhance an LCD film color performance by up to 50%, and help it reach 100% of the NTSC standard. I interviewed QDVision's CTO and co-founder back in 2009 - and this still gives a good introduction to Quantum Dots.

Sony announced a new DLSR, the A58. This new mid-range camera sports a newly-developed 20mp sensor, new lock-on focus mode and auto-object framing mode. The EVF uses an SVGA (800x600) OLED microdisplay. The back display uses Sony's new Triluminos Quantum-Dots enhanced LCD (the first time this display is used in a consumer product, expect Sony's newest TVs). We just spotted the A58 on Amazon.co.uk - and it will launch on April 19 2013 in the UK for £500.

That SVGA OLED microdisplay is interesting. Sony themselves released 0.5" XGA (1024x768) and 0.7" 1280x720 OLED microdisplays back in August 2011 (they are using the XGA ones in several DSLRs, such as the A99 and the A65), and they never mentioned an SVGA one. We do know that both eMagin and Olightek are making SVGA microdisplays however.

During CES Sony unveiled some new LED-backlit LCD TVs under the Triluminos brand, which use QDvision's quantum dot films to enhance the color gamut. Apparently the new TV's color gamut is quite close to OLED TVs, although the contrast is not as good. As far as we know these are the first TVs to use Quantum Dots enhancement films.

According to reports, the company no longer develops Q-LED (or QDLED) displays as these panels have been too difficult to produce reliably, and they now focus on the QD films. I interviewed QDVision's CTO and co-founder back in 2009 - and this still gives a good introduction to QDots.

Nanosys announced it has raised $15 million (this is the company's sixth financing round) - to expand its QDEF production capacity. Nanosys says that response from manufacturers has been great and demand for their QDEF film (which improves the color performance and efficiency of LCD displays) has grown - so much they will now expand their capacity tenfold, which will make them the largest quantum dot producer in the world.

QDEF films are drop-in films that are placed on a phosphor-less gallium nitride LED backlight. They act like a phosphor - absorbing the blue light from the LED and producing red and green light, which is then combined with the original blue light to generate a high-quality white light. They say that a QDEF-powered BLU is more efficient, too. Back in June I visited Nanosys' booth at SID 2012, you can read more about this interesting technology here.

I visited two companies active with Quantum Dots for displays at SID. First up was Nanosys, which developed their quantum dot enhancement film (QDEF) technology - which dramatically improves LCD color. Nanosys showed a couple of comparisons at their booth of Apple's iPad 2 and an LCD TV - with and without the QDEF film.

The comparison was quite good, and the displays that feature the QDEF films had more vibrant colors. However, compared to Samsung's and LG's OLED TVs, those LCDs were still bland to my taste. But maybe I'm not really being objective here.

Scientists from the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi, India developed graphene based quantum dots (GQDs) blended with organic polymers. The new GQDs do not use any toxic metals such cadmium and lead used in today's quantum dots. The new devices actually perform better - less current loss and improved efficiency.

The researchers say that these GQDs may be used in organic solar cells and OLED displays - and indeed they fabricated a prototype OLED display with "good performance". Their work could lead to light-weight, flexible and cheap panels - used in large-area roll-to-roll manufacturing. The efficiency of the fabricated device is still low, and the researchers are working towards increased efficiency.

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.

QD Vision and LG display announced a joint-development agreement - to create highly-efficient, high-performance active matrix displays based on electroluminescent quantum dot LED (QLEDs). According to QD Vision, such displays will use less power than other technologies (including OLEDs) and have brighter and richer colors. They will also be cheaper to produce.

QD Vision says that QLEDs have several advantages: pure color, low-power consumption, low-cost manufacturing and are ultrathin, transparent and flexible. Back in 2009 we posted an interview with QD-Vision's founder and CTO, explaining their technology and how it applies to displays and lighting.