Sony Begins OLED Mass Production

Dodger73 writes "According to their press release at sony.net, Sony beings mass production of full color OLED displays at 3.8" size for their Clie PEG-VZ90 'Personal Entertainment Handheld.' The press release claims, that their 'Super Top Emission' technology reaches 150cd/m^2; at the familiar 1000:1 contrast ratio. Not quite the 19" display I'd like for my computer at home, but definitely a step in the right direction."

For those of you who don't yet know...

[JamesD_UK]

OLED = Organic Light-Emitting Diode [wave-report.com]

Power consumption....

[imsabbel]

should be quite a bit lower than lcds. The diods are far less efficient than the lcd backlights, BUT:
-You dont need polarizers and color filters (those absorb >2/3 of the light in a lcd)
-Dark pixels are just not powered/lower powered (if the typical brightness level is low, this is another factor of 2-4).
So the organic leds only need 10% of the effience of normal ones to break even, which should be very archiveable.

lifetime of display?

[mshultz]

Has any progress been made regarding the life of these displays? Last I heard, the longest these things would last was about a year or two before going too dim to be useful.

Unless Sony is figuring that the early adopters will be people who tend to buy new PDA's quite frequently anyway, and will therefore be willing to get rid of this one once the next generation comes out the following year...

Re:Human Side?

[Paulrothrock]

How does this impact the elderly users?

OLEDs can be made much bigger and lighter than CRTs without sacrificing performance. This means the elderly can run Firefox with 72 point fonts so they can read them and still fit a page width on the screen.

In other news...

[tcdk]

...Sony releases the Clie VZ90 [palminfocenter.com]. To bad it's for Japan only, as Sony has decided to pull out of USA and Europe when comes to PDAs [palminfocenter.com].

Re:Clie?

[daiakuma]

The new Clie that they've just introduced is more of an entertainment device than a traditional PDA. Since the Clie brand is well-known and respected, it would make very good sense for them to start selling entertainment devices under the Clie brand in the US, I guess.

Re:Didn't Kodak introduce an OLED display ?

[Blitzenn]

Yes they did play a big part in the development of OLED technology.
Kodak OLED Research [kodak.com]

Re:Took Longer Then I expected

[Blitzenn]

Production cost is one factor. It is still more expensive to manufacture these things. There are articles out there that claim otherwise, but they are simply wrong. Here is an Independent analysis [frost.com] of manufacturer who happens to make OLEDS. It is a good synopsis of what the real problem is there.

The other problem is that the operation life span of an OLED display is much shorter than other comparable display technologies. The link here [www2.vdma.de] is a really good PDF on OLED, what it really is and what advantagious and it's problems. (apologize of my spelling errors, I was too lazy to go back and correct them.)

For those of you that only beleive Wikipedia...

['t is DjiM]

Wikipedia-link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED [wikipedia.org] Wikipedia states that the main advantage is that (apart from the contrast ratio and the response times) it doesn't need back-lighting and thus has a lower power-consumption. Will this also be true for very large OLED displays? I can imagine that, since every single pixel has to light up by itself, it can be more efficient to use a backlight. Anyone has an idea about the power consumption per pixel for OLEDs and TFT/LCD?

Re:OLED is described in article

[flend]

`Mother nature knows best' :) Unfortunately the word `organic' here just means based on carbon chemistry. The organic materials used in OLED and PLEDs (polymer LEDs) do not occur in nature and have to be synthesised by chemists (eg. Alq3, PPVs etc.)

Re:Response time

[close_wait]

The data sheet included in the press release gives 16msec for LCD, 0.01msec for OLED. That's 1600 x more responsive by my calculation.

Re:failure rate is still high

[Blitzenn]

NO real progress has been made in that area. The color failure rate is still pretty high. the typical failure is a pixel getting 'stuck' in the on or off position. Being that the display is more expensive to make than other available technologies, they probably won't be replaceable and will make the units, escentially, throw aways or disposables.

See my other comment [slashdot.org] for details and supporting links.

Re:OLED is described in article

[phobos13013]

perhaps one day we will have an organic computer!

hate to burst your bubble but just because they are made out of 'organic' materials doesnt mean they are natural. All it means is that instead of oil based acrylics, and metal laden materials, they are using carbon-based materials that have fast-transfer dendric properties. These materials are about as natural as DDT. They are still really cool devices tho and have a great contribution to technology, just dont go around thinking its like an extenstion of the human body or about to go reproducing on its own now...

Re:For those of you who don't yet know...

[NoMercy]

The main thing is there light emmiting, thus you can get a true black (no light emmited) and strong colors, where as with a LCD display where the light is blocked off, which not only means you've got a huge great big backlight which can't produce the same brightness in many cases as other displays, but you don't get a true black as liquid crystals can never block off 100% of the light.

Personally I'm hoping to see OLED displays in case-mods, since unlike LCD's they won't light up the area even when black vivid images could be shown inside a case :)

Re:For those of you who don't yet know...

[saha]

CRTs also have other advantages, of higher viewing angle than LCDs and higher color gamut and larger dynamic range. I still prefer using a LaCie Electron Blue [lacie.com] CRT to do my Photoshop work. Most video cards RAMDACs are limited to 8-bit (exceptions I can think of are SGI Onyx IR and Tezro [sgi.com]systems and other specialized gfx cards), CRTs could easily do 10-bit, 12-bit color per pixel. If you're in the print and publishing industry you'll still want to use a CRT unless the 21" CRT hulk is crowding your workspace, or a radiologist who needs 10-bit [matroxmed.com] or greater grayscale to discern which legions in the x-ray have a tumor. I don't want my radiologist looking at no 8-bit (256 shade) video card and monitor for my X-rays. I haven't seen any specs on what the OLEDs can do. All that stated is that its comparable, which is vague and ambiguous to me.

Re:lifetime of display?

[mshultz]

What I've read (but I am a violinist, not an engineer...) is that typical OLED displays have a life of about 5-10,000 hours. These folks [onestopdisplays.net] apparently market a 20,000-hour OLED panel, but I believe that's for the monochrome version. That measurement is the amount of time until the panel display reaches half-brightness, I believe.

Even a 10,000-hour display would give you a decent useful lifetime, but according to this page [kodak.com], little things like exposure to air, humidity, and temperature extremes can reduce the display's lifetime.

Actually you do need polarizers.

[purduephotog]

The big problem with OLEDs is you need some way to make them dark. Really- the ITO substrate is highly reflective, and given the nature of the panel that means your 'off' colour is actually your ambient light level reflected right back at you.

Which lowers the effective contrast to about 30:1.

When you add a polarizer, you can get up to about 250:1. Crank the driving current from .5ma to 1ma and you can get your 1000:1 but at the cost of lifetime (chemical migration, etc).

So yes, you don't particularly need to 'filter' the light, but some modern OLED designs still do... and since I don't know what I can and can't say I won't say anything :)

(used to work on them till they laid me off... bastards)

Oh AND if you have an Analog system thru and thru-

[purduephotog]

you can get as high as 14 bit colour.

Of course that means you need specialized EVERYTHING for displaying a photo, down to how the image is scanned (high end scanners can do *real* 12 and 14 bit imaging... don't believe that 16bit crap- it's usually 'marketing bits' for the last couple.

So if you have a dedicated viewing system that can display an image appropriately at the bit depth (which is a bit of an oxymoron when you're talking about analog systems) you've got an easy 13 bit display.

And want to know something really interesting about that? The image looks lifelike. As in, you could almost reach in and touch it.

8 bit really sucks.

Re:For those of you who don't yet know...

[Jeffrey Baker]

The LCDs *are* brighter, but that doesn't make them better. The manufacturers cannot get the blacks to be any more black, so they make the whites more white to increase the contrast ratio. As you correctly point out, many LCDs need their brightness set well below max, because generally to avoid eye strain you wouldn't want your display to be more than three times brighter than ambient.