Sony Launches 3mm Thin XEL-1 OLED TV

i4u writes "Sony introduces their first commercial OLED TV, the XEL-1. The stunning XEL-1 is what Sony teased on Friday on their site in Japan. The XEL-1 is an 11-inch display that is only 3 mm thin. It features a dramatic 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and the power consumption is a low 45 W. Sony plans to start shipping the XEL-1 OLED TV on December 1 for 200,000 Yen (~$1,740). Here is Sony's OLED TV product page (in Japanese)."

Re:Sir Not-so-Thin

[mwvdlee]

Actually, it has.

The display itself may be 3mm thin, but it's connected to a much bigger stand.

I really don't see the point of having a display 3mm thin when it still needs more than a thirtyfold space of that to place it somewhere.

If it could be mounted to a wall and the whole thing was still only 3mm thin, It'd be useful.

Power consumption?

[hatchet]

"and the power consumption is a low 45 W"
Current laptop 17" LCDs have power consumption around 15W or so.

Re:Lifespan?

[MLCT]

Lifespans are at acceptable consumer grade (25,000-50,000 hours+ - equivalent to a modern CRT). The big manufacturers don't put these into production lines without the consumer lifespans being hit - part of the reason that it has taken until 2007 for oleds to move beyond mp3 display screens Polymer OLED's (a different technology from what Sony are using) are a bit behind, CDT were reporting blue lifetimes of 6,000-10,000 hours (red and green are fine). That is a bit understandable though, as polymer oled technology is newer and less well developed than small molecule vacuum deposition oleds (what sony and almost everyone else are using).

low power ?

[Eivind]

45W from an 11inch display is not, by a long shot, low-power. If that scales linearily with screen real-estate, then that is equivalent to 600W for a 40 inch (the current top-seller size), which is aproximately 3 times the power used by an average flat-screen TV of that size sold currently.

Re:RJ45?

[KokorHekkus]

Most likely Sonys new "Bravia Internet Video Link". Seems like it's only for streaming for now... and perhaps Sony will realise that people wants a hdd to save to as well. But judging from past behaviour from Sony it might really take some time since customer lock-in has been pretty high on the list of priorities.

http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/consumer/television/flat_panel_displays/lcd/release/27475.html [sony.com] http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/gallery-and-hands-on-sony-bravia-internet-video-link-box-226824.php [gizmodo.com]

Re:Size does matter

[MLCT]

It actually does make a lot of sense. Current OLED's have the same limitations of size as LCD (namely everything is restricted by the largest shadow mask you can use) as they are vacuum deposited small molecules. Even with this limitation you have much superior contrast ratios (the screen itself luminescences, it is not filtering a backlight) and perfect 180x180 degree visibility (lcd have made some progress in that department but they still aren't all that good). Plasmas consume a lot of electricity and have some questionable reliability issues. With future technologies in the pipeline (namely polymer oleds and dendrimer oleds) that allow solution deposition - a process very similar to standard inkjet printing - then the size limitation disappears and an oled Tv 100" big can be manufactured if you want it - it all just takes time.

Re:That contrast ratio implies the blacks are good

[wrmrxxx]

An LCD shows a black pixel by trying (not quite successfully as it turns out) to block out the light from a bright white back-light behind it. An OLED shows a black pixel by just not turning on the pixel - there's no back-light to try to hide because the pixels themselves are the light emitters. You can reasonably expect an 'off' pixel to be as black as the whole display is when it is switched off.

Re:Lifespan?

[Guspaz]

It is, of course, possible to compensate by simply adjusting the colour balance to compensate. The colour balance would become corrected at the expense of overall display brightness.

I think, though, that this is an important first step; for years we've been waiting for large commercial OLEDs to become available. Now, they finally are, with this small first step. Now we'll start to see larger and cheaper screens slowly develop, until we can finally get "big screen TVs" that use OLEDs.

In addition, at 11 inches, this is pretty close to laptop territory. I expect to see 12 inch OLED laptops as soon as the price comes down a bit (say, to $500 for just the panel).

Re:Contrast ratio claims are ridiculous

[cnettel]

There is no reason that projected film should be superior to everything else. Projected film is still just that: projected, i.e. a negative mask hiding part of the light from the projector. The contrast ratio is completely depenendent on the light absorption of the actual film material. A diode with no voltage is very dark indeed, so the real issue is the quality of the driving electronics.

Now, what makes this irrelevant is of course the fact that because of the very nature of this display, the real issue for contrast is not the contrast ratio in a completely dark room, but the actual brightness related to ambient light. When you factor in the ambient light as the real source of light in the black parts, you'll get a different ratio, but this is the only technology where the ambient light, even in a really dark room, is close to the only source of light in the black parts of the picture.

Re:That contrast ratio implies the blacks are good

[Cowclops]

There are in fact two relevant contrast ratios to consider. One is the ratio between the brightest white it can display in a full screen and the darkest black it can display full screen. The other is the ratio between the white and black when both are displayed simultaneously.

What people don't realize (because CRTs typically don't include contrast specs) is that while a CRT can achieve ~15,000:1 dynamic contrast (i.e. the ratio between an all white and an all black screen), the reality is when you put both black and white together, one washes the other one out. CRTs, in actuality, can't do much more than about 500:1 contrast.

The key point is that dynamic contrast is not a bullshit marketing term. The reason CRTs have apparently great black levels is because their dynamic contrast is much higher than that of LCD screens. An LCD with a panel contrast of 1000:1 and no other backlight tricks will have a dynamic contrast of 1000:1. Thats why in bright-overall scenes, it looks GREAT, but in dark scenes it washes out. In bright scenes on an LCD vs a CRT, you're basically comparing ansi contrast to ansi contrast, and LCD can get ~1000:1 with no washout. A CRT can't. In dark screens, an LCD can't make quite as dark blacks, so you're now comparing dynamic vs dynamic contrast. The CRT could pull in 15,000:1, but the LCD is still stuck at 1,000:1.

Current displays improve this by varying the intensity of the light source, then stretching the brightness of an average-dark image to maintain the full panel contrast. That way, you can get the full ansi contrast over a wider range of actual brightness values. It looks like current LCD monitors vary the black light to increase dynamic contrast from 1000:1 to 3000:1, and LCD projectors can open and close an aperture in the lens to jack dynamic contrast up to 10,000:1.

The point is, there are two types of contrast. LCD beats the crap out of CRT in one type, but CRT beats the crap out of LCD in the other type. Neither specs are marketing BS, and you need to know both to understand how contrasty a screen will look in practice.