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."

Re:Better color gamut

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understand it, the "hybrids" are LCDs with white LED backlights. There are a (very) few laptops with these already, and Engadget had a story (today?) about Samsung producing some desktop-sizes panels using this technology very soon.

There have been prototypes of large OLED displays for a long time. There must be some sort of cost or production-related reason why they aren't being commercialised yet. One rumour is that they have a limited life.

I can't wait. I'm currently using an LCD as a digital picture frame. The improved viewing angle, darker black level and better colour gamut would make OLEDs far superior in this application.

Was hoping for superior LCDs...

[bluefoxlucid]

I was hoping for superior LCDs like those used in the OLPC. Jepsen developed an LCD display that, instead of using a crappy high-power fluorescent backlight and filters, uses a bright-white LED and a diffraction grating to deliver a display. This results in a much wider gamut, because of the wider color gamut of the white LED. It also uses 1/7 the power of a normal LCD display, because the light comes from the LED and gets redirected out the proper pixel; the brightness of the LED is adjusted as needed (an LED switches on/off effectively instantly, you can read the network signal on gigabit ethernet by sticking an LED inline). It's also cheap because existing LCD fabrication technology can be easily modified in place to do this (retooling), rather than being completely replaced with OLED fabrication technology.

Blue Is The Colour

[Dunx]

Presumably then they have solved the problem of blue OLEDs burning out after a year.

Re:I'll believe it when I see it

[jcrash]

At 20 inches, it doesn't need to be 1080p. You couldn't tell the difference if it was, so it really doesn't matter.

Summary of the last sentence:

[Falkkin]

"We have no details, but if we did, they'd be wrong anyway!"

Re:Whatever happend to SEDs?

[drinkypoo]

The only advantages of SED over OLED are sideways viewing angle (OLED is better than LCD, but it still mostly wants to project light in one direction) and lifetime. OLED is superior in every other way; contrast ratio, black level, power consumption, weight, flexibility (of which SED has none), cost of production once the processes are ironed out, and probably the amount of energy consumed and pollution produced in making the things.

Re:What about monitors?

[norminator]

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.

As others have already posted, it doesn't make sense to just put a backlight behind an already emissive display. But also, I did see a 15" prototype OLED screen in the Sanyo booth at CES 2003, and even 4 years ago, the screen looked bright, sharp, and was super-thin, with great contrast and color. If a 15" screen was able to look good on a 15" monitor 4 years ago, I'm sure brightness isn't going to be an issue for a laptop screens.

I'm also not sure how the brightness of the individual elements would be affected by the size of the screen... it's just more pixels, and each pixel would be powered independently, so as long as each pixel can draw the same amount of current at the same voltage when there's a lot of them as when there's just a few, the brightness should be the same. AFAIK, you'd just need a bigger power supply.