OLED TVs Arriving Within the Next Three Years

Anonymous Howard writes "Toshiba and Matsushita, in a joint venture, are going to be bringing OLED TV panels to market within 3 years! Granted, the size of the panel is only 20.8 inches, but that is a huge step up from the small OLED screens used in cell phones and other portable devices. It will have a resolution of 1,280 by 768 pixels (WXGA) and handles 16.7 million colors. No specifications on contrast, brightness, or refresh rates have been released, but such specs wouldn't necessarily be indicative of OLED displays to be released in three years' time."

Talk about late to market

[sunderland56]

OK, they will start arriving in 3 years, they don't do true HDTV when everyone else is at 1080p, and they're only 20 inch diagonal. Wow, I'm sure the marketplace will just snap them up like hotcakes - especially since they'll start off at an inflated "new technology" price point.

When you've got a $5000 20" OLED set, and your buddy's got a $3000 50" plasma 1080p set, who's going to win the pissing war, or host the cool SuperBowl party??

Re:What about monitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

> In theory OLEDs should be able to work without a backlight. It's been discovered, however, that in practically,
> the luminosity just isn't good enough on large displays. So these might have to have a backlight.

An OLED with a backlight? I believe you are mistaken; that doesn't make sense, because OLED is intrisically an emissive rather than transmissivetechnology. Can you cite a reference?

I think that you are getting confused with smaller LCD displays, like those on phones, cameras and so on, which use a white LED as a backlight. In some cases, that is an OLED white LED backlight.

Re:why not 1080p

[maxume]

2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*3=768. For 4:3 screens(thats where the 3 comes from), there is some reason to presume that it increased addressing efficiency(memory wise) to use a power of two and it just got pulled along for legacy reasons. For other ratios, who knows, but probably inertia as much as anything else(and addressing that many lines is straightforward as 3 blocks of 256, which is probably as good a reason as any).

OLED isn't what it's cracked up to be, yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've now owned a few OLED based devices and there's one common problem with all of them: Flicker. LED's change intensity by lowering the flicker rate of the bulb itself. One of the biggest things about this OLED based MP3/Video player I have here, while yes, the colour and contrast is beautiful, it also flickers badly. Not in framerate, but actual flicker. Moving the screen makes the flicker much more apparent. I would say it refreshes at around 20Hz.

If they can figure out how to minimise the flicker on OLED's, based on what I've seen in smaller devices, then yes, I can see it taking off... but until then, it's going to be headache inducing to watch.

Re:Better color gamut

[jabuzz]

The problem with bringing any new display technology to the market is that you have to hit the ground running. Let's say the current production of 20" LCD panels is 10 million a year (which seems reasonable to me and is possibly more). Therefore if you are bringing a 20" OLED to the market you need to be able to make at least 1 million a year. That is a very high entry barrier.

There are issues with the blue, however these have now been solved with 20,000 hours lifetime (five years at 10 hours a day). Other issues revolve around a set of patents held by Eastman Kodak that need licensing, manufactures might well be holding off till they expire. Finally LCD displays have got where they are today over 30 years of incremental improvements in manufacturing techniques, a luxury not afforded to new display technologies.