Samsung Shows Off 21" OLED Display

aztektum writes "C|Net and Technewsworld.com have posted stories about Samsung's new 21" OLED. Chosun.com has a picture and a projection that OLEDs will be a 2.2 billion dollar a year market by 2008."

Re:Wow...

[hattig]

That's 6.22m subpixels really. 1920x1080 display, 3 subpixels (RGB) per pixel = 6220800 subpixels, or 2073600 full pixels.

Still, I would like this display, especially if it was cheap and suitable for computer work as well as video work.

Incorrect. - 1920 x 1080

[EnglishTim]

It's 1920x1080 - the quoted pixel count is for each red, green and blue element.

While the Living Jokes are Funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

It might be useful to remind people that organic does not imply life. Organic, in a chemical sense (I am fairly certain - though I am studying physics, not chemistry), implies molecules with carbon (and maybe hydrogen or oxygen?), nothing more. Similarly, organic molecules are hypothesized to be widely distributed through space (such as on Titan, where they may rain from the sky). While organic molecules might be necessary to have life, alone they may not be sufficient for it.

Re:Wooo!

[gl4ss]

so.. you were going to see the ultra high resolution and brightness on your screen?

I always get a kick out of tv adverts advertising tv's, and showing off their awesome brightness, contrast or whatever..

Re:Nonsense in Chosun article?

[syle]

My guess would be that it's not a resolution/speed issue, but a resolution/framerate thing. Having faster pixels doesn't mean you can have a higher res, but it does mean you can have a higher res at the same framerate as a lower one.

Re:Seriously

[Zemrec]

AFAIK, they're called "organic" because they're based on organic molecules, i.e. organic chemistry, which is primarily concerned with carbon-based long chain molecules.

IANAChemist, but that's my take on it.

One thing that I wondered about is the article says OLEDs require more power than LCDs at the present time. I thought that one of the main benefits of OLED was that they'd use a lot less power and so would extend laptop battery life, amongst other things.

Can anyone explain that?

Re:organic

[Munra]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic [wikipedia.org]

Manta

Re:Seriously

[khrtt]

I thought that one of the main benefits of OLED was that they'd use a lot less power

This is because an LCD display is inherently inefficient. We can realistically assume that the LCD matrix itself has near-zero power requirements, and the backlight is somewhat more efficient as the OLED in converting electricity to light. However, the color filters in the LCD cut out at least 2/3 of the light output, and the polarizers eats up 1/2 of the rest, and the remaining 16% of the light is the white level. In other words, if your LCD screen is all white the efficiency is no more than 16% of the backlight output, and if your screen is black, the efficiency is 0.

There are other issues with LCD:

1. Contrast. The black areas of the LCD always leak some light, creating the contrast issue. With OLED, black means "light off", so the issue isn't there, unless you were using shitty drive electronics that prevented you from turning the output off completely, which would be stupid.

2. Viewing angle. All LCDs have this issue, even though it's gotten much, much better with the newer ones. The reason for this problem is that. angle of polarization doesn't rotate properly when the light goes through the liquid cristal at an angle.

3. LCDs are mechanically awkward. They are sure better than a vacuum-filled glass jar, but there still have to be two sheets of high-precision glass with a precisely controlled gap in between, and a backlight tube. The whole thing is rather fragile. An OLED doesn't really have to have any glass in it at all, even though the first ones do.

Re:Nice picture, but

[jilbert]

Could be. The blue OLED was the hardest to produce, and fades quiker over time than the green or red. So as well as getting dimmer over time, OLED screens also develop a colour cast.

Re:Nonsense in Chosun article?

[powermung]

It seems like a translation error. Nowhere in the original Korean version of the article mentions higher resolution. The corresponding section should have been translated "enables smoother video/animation display."

Re:Nice picture, but

[lmaali]

Could be. The blue OLED was the hardest to produce, and fades quiker over time than the green or red. So as well as getting dimmer over time, OLED screens also develop a colour cast.

Not quite. The blue OLED materials typically have electronic properties (in particular, the LUMO level) that makes electrical connections difficult, but we've had blue materials for quite some time. There tends to be a large voltage drop at the cathode, this means they have to be driven harder (and hotter). Also, the photopic response of the eye is best in the green, so for displays (where blue and green are next to each other) the blue has to be driven even harder to be perceived to be as bright as the green by the eye. This has largely been responsible for the poor lifetimes of the blues.

But they aren't harder to make.

SEIKO showed a 35" OLED display in MAY ...

[Vedanti]

According to this IEEE pdf document ... [ieee.org]

Seiko Epson, using inkjet printing, unveiled a 35-inch (88-cm) prototype full-color OLED display in May-- the industry's largest OLED screen. Seiko Epson says it will be able to produce large OLED TV panels using this technology after improving its OLED materials and extending their lifetime.

Re:Nonsense in Chosun article?

[tjhayes]

Yes maybe in 30 years of using computers you would have heard resolution mean anything other than the number of pixels. But in the TV world there are concepts called temporal resolution and spatial resolution. Spatial resolution is indeed just the number of pixels, whereas temporal resolution is the # of pixels * framerate. I'm sure that they're talking of temporal resolution in this article, and it makes sense to. This is what we really perceive.