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Hardware

New And Improved LCDs 96

Posted by CmdrTaco from the more-pixels-equals-happier-rob dept.
Ender42 writes "Princeton scientists have created a variety of light-emitting materials that could greatly accelerate the development of flat-panel computer screens and other compact video displays. The discovery, a feat of engineering materials at the level of quantum mechanics, also may yield insights into the basic properties of light-emitting substances. " Practically speaking this means cheaper, higher res, lower power LCD displays. "
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New And Improved LCDs More

New And Improved LCDs

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  • Re:Stop thinking in the windows world! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I disagree for a number of reasons. First, some people "need" 3-billion xterms (or whatever) on the screen at once, which means they must be very small and hence need a high resolution to be readable. Resolution translates directly to screen-realestate (if your eyes can take it). Of course this could be customizable, but it's not true that size and res have "NOTHING" to do with each other. Secondly: performance. You probably want to scale everything but that is an extreme waste of precious cpu-cycles. Switching virtual desktops is slow enough as it is, if I have lots of windows opened. And if anybody thinks you can get away without antialiased/interpolated scaling just have a look at ghostview or any other font-scaling software. It looks like total crap. Almost unreadable IMHO, even at font-sizes that could _easily_ allow for very pretty characters. In all cases when I bought a new monitor for higher resolutions it was to increase the space on my desktop, never for better "clarity". But I agree that more clarity (nicer fonts mainly) would be cool. I'm wondering almost daily why I don't have xterms with multicolored-font-support, able to use antialiased bitmap-fonts (man, do I love RiscOS *sigh*). Perhaps I'm just stupid and have not yet found it (ideas anybody ?). That should be so easy to do (yeah, "do it yourself" :), and would be more important, at least for me, than simply higher resolutions. To summarize: your idea sounds great but is impractical, wasteful and unsupported. I would like to be proven wrong ;)
    twi (linden@rhein.com)
  • NIC card.
    --
    Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.
  • This is absolutely awesome. i want these displays!

  • Wow! (Score:1)

    by RAruler ( 11862 )
    Couple this with a Crusoe proccessor, and you've got a High-Res, long lasting portable.. I have but one word for this.. Sweeeeeeeeet! Now, when them Color Palms come out... woowza.. sweeet!
  • I think what the parent comment was saying was clarity & high-resolution should be independant from amount of real-estate. Ideally, all monitors would be infinite resolution, and real estate would be fully adjustable (i.e. not tiers, just a lil' bar you could move left to right to make everything smaller, until you're comfortable.)
  • Does this mean I can run 1600x1200 or 1920x1680 on my laptop now?
    --
  • Running 1600x1200 on a 15" LCD screen would be unbearable. It's almost too small for my 21" CRT...

    Actually, LCD sizes are viewable, CRTs are tube size. A 15" LCD would be around 1" smaller than a 17". 1280x1024 on a 17" looks pretty good to me. I run 1280x1024 on my 19" (1600x1280 looks like some pixels aren't bright enough).
    --

  • I thought a third advantage of LCDs over LEDs was that LCDs require less power to operate. This article claims that the new OLEDs takes even less power than LCDs. That's pretty cool if you ask me.

    Finally, you'll be able to use the computer in bed!
  • It's too bad you're not using Aqua. Or NeXT. THEY'VE got scalable GUIs.
  • In 3.1, it was easy. I think in win.ini, you added/modified a few settings, and the border size, icon spacing, etc all changed...

    Then again, having windows "in-proportion" is a nice idea, but pointless if the icons you're concerned about are, oh, 1 mm on a side.
  • Another problem with making LED displayes in this way is the price. You'd need one big wafer for a monitor, and if you think the P3 is expensive, just compare the surface area of a P3 chip (~2cm^2) to that of a reasonable screen display. a 20" at 2500cm^2 screen is 1250 times as big!
  • Hmm... That's interesting. I never really thought about a fold-able screen. I wonder if that would be feasible. Of course, then you move away from making a *wide* laptop, to a *thick* laptop, depending on how think your LCD is.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • If yo want to run 1600 just go buy a 21 inch monitor. It's pretty neat having a display that big. My desk is a bit small so I put my monitor about 8 inches off center. My eyes have to refocus when I look at the far right edge. Just enough to notice, not the least bit annoying.
  • How do you become a multibillion dollar multinational coporation by passing the savings onto your customer.

    Successful innovation in business has always been about making more and making them cheaper. If you can make twice as many at half the cost, you can easily cut your prices 25% or more over the competition and still make a killing. Free enterprise at work!
  • No, but it means that your laptop battery might last 10 hours, 30 if you have a crusoe processor.

    Did you even read the article?
  • Probably this will be directed more toward the portables market, because of the greater energy efficency.

    and please read the article next time.
  • The use of the term Organic LED, leads me to suspect that they might be building on technology developed in Cambridge, UK - Light Emitting Polymers. BTW i'm a brit!

    For a run down see

    Cambridge Display Technologies - Technical Info [cdtltd.co.uk]

    it gives a good technical overview of the technology.

    Effectively since it is all on a polymer substrate they can make screens into an shape or size, e.g. a Display wrapped around a glass!

    IIRC they had problems with premature burnout, i.e. after about ~5000 hours the display quality deteriorated rapidly. QFX

  • You left out the most important part:

    Additional funding came from the Department of Defense, the Air Force and the National Science Foundation.

    When does the government stop stealing money through taxation and, through university research, giving it to businesses?
  • Make sense.

    LCDs work by blocking light. So, to make a panel to give off N brightness unit, the backlighting must be at least N bright, but it has to be brighter because even in transparent state you will not get 100% light transmission efficiency. (Even regular window glass only transmit 90% or so or light, I think).

    LEDs work by light emission. If the LED emit N bightness unit, you only have to feed in the juice to give N brightness unit to get a N brightness unit panel...

    -=- SiKnight
  • Well, if an OLED is anywhere near as fast as a silicon LED (which it should be, given the same basic premise), it should actually have a much HIGHER refresh rate than LCD's.

    Liquid crystal displays actually have to realign crystal cells, which is quite a lengthy process (which causes the ghosting). LED's are just a P/N junction. Turn power on -> light starts as soon as the junction triggers. Turn power off -> light dies.

    OLED's should have comparable performance to LED's, which can have refresh-rates in the megahertz.

  • Display size (1600x1024) is not resolution. Resolution is dots-per-inch. And while Windows handles dpi deplorably, it is does handle it.

    Display Properties->Settings->Advanced->General

    The setting is labeled "Font Size", but it just adjusts the screen's dpi setting (which is shown below the control). Fonts are most obviously affected, but the size of the window widgets will also scale. (Because they're just glyphs themselves: try removing Marlett from your font folder.) And, theoretically, WYSIWYG-aware apps will also scale properly.

    <RANT>At least, that's how it's supposed to work in theory. In practice, I've found that most Windows apps are blissfully unaware of what the real screen resolution is. This is what happens when you implement a feature half-assed and provide barely adequate support, much less drawing attention to it or requiring adherence to the standard.

    And it's not even that difficult to do. Wasn't the whole point of DDC to allow monitors to report their physical configuration back to the OS? But no! Most el-cheapo monitors can barely be asked to report non-generic information, much less resolution, gamma and phosphor characteristics necessary to create adequate WYSIWYG. So Windows is made to rely too much on INF files, encouraging the hardware manufacturers to put less effort into DDC. And as for your LCD, well WYSIWYG should be nothing more than trivial since LCDs have discrete pixels. So we always know the exact size of the screen, the size of the pixels, and therefore the exact resolution for any display size. How hard is it to divide 12.7" by 1600? But apparently, that kind of math is too complicated for Windows, and you have to tell Windows what the dpi is yourself, and in a dialog that takes no less than 5 clicks to access.</RANT>

    ObOn-topic:
    So would it be possible to make an organic laser-emitting diode based on this process?
  • I'm reserving comment about whether eyestrain will or won't exist with these screens. On the one hand, the light emitted is of a lower intensity, not to mention the lack of x-rays. But it's still emitted light, and our eyes evolved around looking at reflected light. And then there's the matter of refresh. I've never seen an OLED of any variety or incarnation, so I'm obviously talking out of my ass. But while the article mentions that these new hybrid OLEDs are faster than some older types, that still says nothing about how fast they are compared to LCDs or CRTs. So until I actually see one actually working, I have to wonder how practical they will be for computer applications without any kind of flicker or persistance.

    Now, how about a sheet-sized OLED acting as a backlight to a LCD screen.
  • From the article: Forrest said electronics manufacturers could use the new technique within six months in certain applications such as car stereo displays. Eventually the technique could lead to the ubiquitous use of OLEDs in products such as palm pilots, cell phones and laptop computers.

    sounds to me like this is ready for prime time.
    _________________________

  • your problem can be taken care of in 6 easy steps:

    1. Go to best buy.
    2. in the computer section, ask sales person for a new (insert number, >15 here) inch monitor.
    3. give man at cash register credit card, sign on dotted line.
    4. go home
    5. unconnect old monitor, connect new monitor
    6. change resolution setting in OS of choice to one that fits your new monitor, ie: 17": 1024x768, 19":1280x1024, etc.

    -----
  • physicists around who can confirm the validity of this - OLEDs can be made from two types of molecules, fluorescent and phosphorescent. ?? If this is so then does this mean that there are actual molecules that glow in the familiar yellow/green colour patterns that we've all become familiar with? Heck - or even that molecules themselves give off light; sorta *virtual flashlight* effect.
    I am the first to admit lack of knowlege but I was under the impression that light in the visible spectrum is a by-product of chemical reaction that occurs at the molecular level, not due to the molecules themselves. Can anyone clarify..
  • The prospects for palmtops/wearables/other portables are especially nice. Higher res, lower power...but...um...cost...?
    Well, it's a start.
    -Ravagin
    "Ladies and gentlemen, this is NPR! And that means....it's time for a drum solo!"
  • Every time I think I'm about to spend a chunk of money on a new system, this sort of thing makes me want to wait. At this rate, I'll be 'about to buy a new computer' about the time I move into my Moon House...
  • I thought I was the only one who felt this way. ;)

    Manufacturers need to stop shrinking down resolutions to the point of unreadability, and instead work on increasing real estate.

    Meaning, I want everything to appear at the nice, legible size it shows up as at 1024x768. But I want the desktop size to be like 1600x1200 (or greater).

    Same number of pixels per inch, just more pixels on the entire monitor.

    This seems like such an obvious problem.. does anyone know if this is being addressed, anywhere?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Yes, it's feasible, at least in principle. There have already been prototypes for this (which also used organic LEDs, BTW). Basically, when you switch from LCDs to organic LEDs which you can place on plastic, you're almost there. However, there are still a couple of problems with OLEDs to be solved (for example, the first prototypes had a very limited lifespan, the organic materials decomposed very quickly).
  • Agreed...but ultimately, I want direct optic nerve or brain interfacing, the ultimate heads-up (or down, or whatever) display. (That'll do until I get downloaded. :-)
  • If you like the thought of foldable screens, watch out for eink. (www.eink.com) they have been doing some work in that direction, although their current products are a but too um, macroscopic, for such a use as of yet.
  • It's probably going to be a while before they get very cheap:

    Princeton University has applied for a patent on Forrest's work and has licensed rights to the discovery to Universal Display Corporation

    I can't see a company with control over this sort of technology not exploiting it for everything they can get.
  • Well, this would be something if it would hit the market...I'd paste it all over my walls if it ever did. Unfortunately, there's always an incredibly long delay between the discovery of a certain technology in a lab and the moment that technology comes into wide use. For my kids' sake (I'm 24), I hope it's worthwile, more worthwile at least than cathode-ray tubes (1920's technology).
  • test post - please ignore
  • Really, why does everyone assume that high resoloution needs to be tiny fonts, etc? Take what most people use today, 800x600 or up. Go back a few years. Pick up atari resoloution and put it in there. it'll be a tiny window up in a corner. A while back, then capabilities increased, people went "wow, now we can make things look better". Now, when capabilities increase, people go "wow, now we can make half-kinda-ugly things smaller!". Sure, some people need lots of workspace (I do...), but think about it im a few years:

    "Hey check out my 4500x3375 display... you need a 36 inch monitor to even see the text..."

    Now why not take advantage of the possibilities and make everything look nice? Text, for example looks pretty much pixelized on todays screens.

  • Scalable to a very small extent yes.
  • IANAP, but here goes:
    The light that you get from these kinds of materials is the result of electrons dropping from higher energy states to lower. When this happens, the energy is converted electromagnetic radiation. With the useful stuff this happens to be visible light. In any event, this happens at the atomic level, rather than the molecular.
  • Floogle wrote:

    Running 1600x1200 on a 15" LCD screen would be unbearable. It's almost too small for my 21" CRT.

    You are confusing screen resolution with screen object size. Having a screen that's 1024x768 and then moving to one that's 4096x3072 would be no problem if your new desktop had objects which were four times larger in each dimension, plus you'd have the advantage of sharper, higher resolution screen objects.

    Most current desktops have too many things that are hardcoded to a set number of pixels, but fixing this is a simple matter of programming [tf.hut.fi]. As screen resolutions outpace physical desk size, I think people will make sure it's less of an issue.

    ----
  • It's doubtful that this will lead to lower end-user costs.

    The material is cheaper to produce - thus production costs are lower. So the companies making it aren't paying as much to produce each unit...

    End-user pricing, however, is largely based on features, rather than production costs. If these displays are brighter, higher-res, larger physically, etc... there is NO REASON for companies to price them much lower than the current offerings.

    If they price 15" versions of these at the same level as current-tech 15" lcd screens, they'll have a boatload of stuff that the current-tech ones don't (higher-res, brighter, lower-power, etc...) -- that's the draw. For $999 which would you buy? This 15" lcd screen that'll do 1024x768, or this new-tech 15" led-based screen that's brighter, clearer, and will go up to 1600x1200? You'd choose the 2nd, based on featureset. It doesn't matter that the company is making a much larger profit off of it -- you're getting a better monitor for the same price.

    End result: Better products for the same or slightly higher (b/c it's better) prices, while lining the producer's pockets a bit thicker.

    (of course, there's always the possibility that a company would cut prices to undersell competitors, but that's fairly remote considering the profit to be made off these sorts of things)
  • How about a screen that folds out automatically, similar to those "butterfly" keyboards a while back on those IBM subnotebooks...

    Then again, I don't think you'd want a 50 inch screen expanding out of your notebook on a flight in coach...
  • Or it might be that you have really *good* eyes. I'm running at 1600x1200 now on my 21" -- it's a good size, but I wouldn't want anything to appear any smaller than it is right now. At work, I have a 19" and I run it at 1280x1024. I've tried 1600x1200 on it before, but it's just too much of a strain on my eyes if I do work on it for more than an hour or so.

    Interestingly enough, people seem far more likely to accept smaller pixels on an LCD as opposed to a CRT. Why is that? I know the average res for a 15" monitor is 800x600 (sometimes 1024x768), but on a laptop, they go to 1024 at 13" and are sometimes seen with 1280 at 15".

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Fair enough. That's all in theory, but I'm working on a desktop in reality, and my icons and text are not resolution-independent. I'd like to see what Berlin is cooking up, but it seems like they'll be pushing a boulder uphill with all the established X-apps out there.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Gleeb wrote:

    You are confusing screen resolution with screen object size

    No I'm not - I'm aware of the difference, but in practical uses it doesn't exist because, as you pointed out, most of our desktops are hard-coded. And, until our desktops and apps are built using vector-based graphics (bye bye wild E-themes), you're not likely to see anything like that. Well, not under X11 anyway.


    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • I think a lot depends here on the market they will be aiming at - if they go for the executive large-screen laptop market (ultrathin laptops don't have much battery space, so tend to need frequent recharges) then the price can be astronomical and it will still sell. if they want to compete with traditional desktop monitors, though, they will need to compete on price AND have a low failure rate for individual pixels
    I WOULD like to see a nice, flat 21" monitor capable of 1600x though :+)
    --
  • Well, size isn't as bad as it sounds. The blue LED's were the major factor now, but the Virtual Boy had a red LED display in it (which I heard was terrible, but that's for other reasons).

    LED's are just a P/N junction, today we can fit millions of these on a chip. The junction in an LED isn't really that much bigger, so theoretically these things could be built like integrated circuits, including the current-limiting resistors and the latch-and-multiplex circuits sitting at the base of the LED itself. We're only talking 20000 micron technology IC's here, which is hardly difficult by any stretch.

    The current problem is the patent on the new high-intensity blue LED if I recall correctly.

  • Not really, it's up to windows applications to do their own scaling, and they should determine font sizes from the system properties. System controls etc have fonts set to the system's, but it's up to the application, when it does it's own drawing to do the same. If Windows was to take over an application (which it could) you'd have application developers complaining that windows isn't listening to the font or gdi requests.
  • (IANAP either, but...)
    you're absolutely right. What's more: virtually every light-emitting technology we've got doesn't involve chemical reactions. LCD backlights, regular LEDs, neon lights, regular light bulbs...
    and apart from the light bulbs all of these emit light because electrons are dropping from a higher energy state to a lower.
  • It's doubtful that this will lead to lower end-user costs.

    If the parts cost comes down, the retail price comes down. Some of the big manufacturers hate that, but they weren't able to stop the sub-$1000 PC, or the $600 PC. The days of Compaq-like and IBM-like margins in PCs are long gone. It's a brutally competitive commodity business.

    Besides, the big application for low-cost flat panel displays is TV sets. Flat panels are too expensive for that market, but if the technology makes it possible, big, cheap, low-rez flat panels will flood the market.

  • How do you become a multibillion dollar multinational coporation by passing the savings onto your customer. I'll bet we start to see ad campaings telling us to pay more for the screen 'cause we'll pay less on our power bill, and not have to get eye surgury.
  • How much cheaper? No average joe is going to put out $900-1000 bucks for a 15" LCD screen. I would rather get a 21" Viewsonic for 600. LCD Might not get very popular if the prices dont go down... same thing with rambus memory. (Besides all the defects in intels design)
  • Everybody keeps considering these new break throughs to be great for their massive desktop psuedo-supercomputers, I'm wondering why researchers don't develop head mounted displays to a greater extent. I mean seriously, who among us would not awnt to have a wireless unit that pretty much look and feel like sunglasses, but are wirelessly attached to your server at home, and takes input ala Star Trek... But seriously, the products available now, are just too bulky, and hard to deal with, not to mention expensive... anyway... here's a couple sites that sell head units if anyone really wants to see what I mean
    Seattle Site Systems [seattlesight.com]
    Kaiser Electro-Optics [keo.com]
    CGSD -VR [realtimegraphics.com]
    As you can see, a person would have to be seriously disturbed to wear them in their office, let alone the public!
    would anybody other than myself prefer to have an eyepiece rather than a monitor?
  • Here's a link [universaldisplay.com] to the company that will be commercializing the technology. Looks like they've already been working with OLEDs for a while.

  • Re:High Res (Score:3)

    by Foogle ( 35117 ) on Saturday February 19, 2000 @05:21PM (#1259182) Homepage
    While I wouldn't go so far as to rule something like that out, I would ask: Why would you want to?

    Running 1600x1200 on a 15" LCD screen would be unbearable. It's almost too small for my 21" CRT... The only answer to that would be to make the laptop screen bigger, but again I ask: why would you want to? Making a laptop screen bigger than 15" makes it awful clumsy. Sure, everyone wants a big screen, but who wants a big laptop? Not me. I'll stick with 1024x768 screens on my laptops, thanks.

    Having said all that, this technology could easily help out in bringing flatscreen monitors to the world's desktops.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Excellent, now we just need to get... (Score:3)

    by smoondog ( 85133 ) on Saturday February 19, 2000 @05:16PM (#1259183)
    I use one of the high res SGI flat panels (1600x1024, I think) and I love it, except for one problem, OS support. Believe it or not, the dpi is so high and the screen is so bright, that it gives me eyestrain very easily. Even with the largest fonts on Winbloze, they are still much smaller (but very clear!) than on my crappy 15" 1024x768 monitor at home. I wonder when we are going to see a decent solution to this problem. Not just fonts but true scalability! Window borders, icons, etc would all be the same dimensions relative to the monitor size. It is what is needed next, I wonder how long till we get it?

    -- Moondog

  • OLED (Score:3)

    by kwashiorkor ( 105138 ) on Saturday February 19, 2000 @06:18PM (#1259184)
    This breakthrough though is very interesting. Visions of wearable computers based on cheaply manufactured monocles seem to be creeping ever closer to reality :-)

    For more info about OLED, look on Kodak's site:
    http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/produc ts/specialProducts/OEL/oelIndex.shtm l [kodak.com]

    But here's a product that puts to practice a real breakthrough in flat panel display technology. (though I'm not sure about it's power consumption).

    iFire Flat Panel Displays
    Compared with most other flat panel technologies, an iFire flat panel display is a very simple device. It does not involve vacuum like CRT and FED; gases like PDP; or liquids like LCD. This results in reduced susceptibility to shock, vibration and breakage. Unlike LCD that relies on multiple fluorescent tubes to light up the display, iFire flat panel displays emit light from the front portion of the display. This results in a wider viewing angle and a crisper, clearer image. The simple screen printing methods also translate into lower costs, and higher yields, thus producing an affordable flat panel display for the mass consumer market.
    http://www.ifire.com/technology/compar e.html [ifire.com]

    -- kwashiorkor --
    Pure speculation gets you nowhere.

  • Not the limiting factor (Score:3)

    by Captn Pepe ( 139650 ) on Saturday February 19, 2000 @06:48PM (#1259185)
    As far as making huge/affordable flat panel displays goes, the light-emitting material really isn't the limiting factor. The major trouble fabricating these devices in a cost-effective manner is the interconnects that deliver signal to each pixel individually. While this isn't an especially technically challenging problem, it's very expensive to do. So, sure, a cell of OLED may very well turn out to be cheaper to make than an LCD pixel (which may or may not be the case -- mostly depends on how cheaply the OLED compounds can be made and stably bonded to the substrate), but this won't drastically cut the cost of building displays.

    That said, this technology does (as the article correctly emphasizes) enable the construction of much lower-power displays than what is currently used. LEDs have very low heat dissipation, which translates into less wasted current, especially when compared to the heat put out by an LCD backlight. Also, without a backlight, you can make the panel somewhat thinner, so the various comments about using this to make headmount or pda/cellphone displays are probably right on track as to where OLEDs will end up being important.

  • Still some work to do yet (Score:3)

    by Foomaster ( 147363 ) on Sunday February 20, 2000 @11:25AM (#1259186)
    This small-molecule organic display business is quite good, and Forrest is a great researcher in this field, but I think the best is yet to come. I work with light-emitting polymers at UCSB, and I just wanted to comment that in terms of processability and general 'toughness' (i.e. resistance to physical damage) polymer displays will be the ones used in your palm pilots and cel phones. Of course, the only polymer displays that I have seen working have been one color devices for cel phones, so full color is still a ways off yet. Another thing to note is that while it is great to see someone from my field make it to slashdot's front page with what appears to be 'industry-ready' technology, no-one has commented on the great drawback of organic displays (both small-molecule and polymer)- they are tremendously air and UV sensitive. If left exposed to air and normal light, these materials can degrade very rapidly, and engineering an protective layer is not as easy as you think (i.e. you can't just coat it in a transparent polymer layer - oxygen can still diffuse through it). Just be patient for a year or so, and then start looking for this stuff commercially. As a side note to all this, light-emitting polymers can be made into solar-cells with a little modification, so keep your eyes peeled for some light and cheap solar cells in the near future!

  • Correction (Score:4)

    by Silicon_Knight ( 66140 ) on Saturday February 19, 2000 @05:40PM (#1259187)
    If you read the article, you can see that this is *NOT* for LCD use. It's an L*E*D display.

    LCD displays work by having an optically active (chiral) organic molecule layer (called the liquid crystal) sandwiched bewteeen 2 layers of polarizing filters, set at 90 degrees angle. When a current is applied the orientation of the liquid crystal layer changes, and the light's polarization plane doesn't get rotated the 90 degrees to clear the second filter. (Thus appearing to be dark). Take away the voltage, the crystals returns to ground state, plane polarized light is rotated 90 degrees, and it clears the second filter and appears to be transparent. This is how LCD displays on calculators work; color displays built on this principle and add a backlight on the back (ie, laptop) and by controlling the amount of light that passes thru for each pixel, generates the different colors. Note that the light emmision criteria has nothing to do with the liquid crystals; that's why you can't read your calculator in a dark room, and that's why palm devices have a backlight. Another cool thing to try is to take a polarizing sunglasses and hold it between your eye and the laptop screen and rotate it slowly. The display will get darker (at 90 deg) and brighter again (at a full 180 deg).

    Now that we have amused ourselves with LCD technology, let's take a look at what these guys at Princeton actually did:

    They found a new material that can be used in light emitting diodes. LEDs are used for indicator lights on the electronics that we all love. Traditionally, LED displays for flat panel applications are problematic for 2 reasons:

    A: Making the pixels small enough, on a large display.
    B: Finding a materials for blue LEDs.

    The problem with blue LEDs was solved a few years back, but as far as I know A is still a limitation. If you ever look at those big "SonyTron" LED displays in stadiums, up close the pixels are about the size of your THUMB.

    In order for this to suceed, there needs to be a good commercial process to apply the OLED material onto an (ideally) plastic substrate. Plastic substrates are really the way to go because they are less prone to breakage and don't require massive retooling. Hopefully, since the material is organic in nature, incorporating it onto plastic won't be such a difficult idea.

    -=- Terence

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