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Displays Hardware Technology

OLED Displays Technology Primer and Forecasting 197

Posted by timothy from the why-clarita-you're-positively-glowing dept.
HawKe writes "OLEDs are back in the news and Audioholics reports on what makes the technology so special as well as who leads the pack in currently shipping products, vaporware, and displays that are on the horizon. The crux of the matter is whether or not OLEDs, the "eco-friendly" choice, can outpace current LCD and plasma display advances. In order to enter and dominate the home theater and computer display markets, they must not only establish themselves, but also beat the leaders in price and performance."
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OLED Displays Technology Primer and Forecasting More

OLED Displays Technology Primer and Forecasting

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  • Great News... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Piranhaa ( 672441 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:46PM (#9300395)
    Finally a new type of display to use. Normal CRT monitors and TVs screen burn, while being really bulky, lcds have shadow effects and can be damaged REALLY easily sometimes, and plasma displays screen burn easiest. I wonder how this will compare to the rest of the other displays we, as consumers, have used for quite some time!

    • Re:Great News... (Score:5, Informative)

      by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:52PM (#9300431) Homepage Journal
      Except the worst pain about OLEDs nowadays is that they burn out (or more like diffuse and get blurry) way faster than anything else - that's the barrier that keeps them from entering the market.

      • Re:Great News... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Piranhaa ( 672441 )
        True, but nothing is perfect. I'm sure there will be a breakthrough or something that will allow these to not burn out as fast. Just how the lightbulb first started. They added some gas, and it lasted much much longer than it previously had!

        • Re:Great News... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by SharpFang ( 651121 )
          I'd rather see plasmas going so cheap that you can replace one once a year.
          Though tese beasts are so power-hungry I can't imagine a PDA with a plasma screen.

          I'm afraid they won't be able to increase the life time for OLEDs much. But the technology sounds promising that the prices may drop so significantly, that you just buy a PDA and get a replacement display as often as replacement batteries, only much cheaper :)
          • Yeah but I'd hate to put up with constantly degrading displays

          • Re:Great News... (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Steffan ( 126616 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @12:18AM (#9300989)
            • "I'm afraid they won't be able to increase the life time for OLEDs much."
            What is your basis for this statement? There's no physical law which states that the life may not be extended; it's simply a materials science issue. I am quite certain that the current lifetime of the OLEDS (particularly blue, I understand) will be extended sufficiently that lifetime of the OLED becomes largely irrelevant. As OLEDs gain popularity, increasing amounts of engineering will be devoted to improving the yields and performance, much like LCD & Plasma technologies.

            • Re:Great News... (Score:4, Interesting)

              by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @02:07AM (#9301346) Homepage Journal
              The basis is experience with other stuff. Life of a product may be extended 300-500%, sometimes 1000%, but rarely more. If the design isn't long-lived up front, it won't get extra-long-lived through development. There's been a considerable amount of research on OLED lifetime done already, and they got to the pathetic 1000h until now. There's certain level after every next percent gained gets very expensive and further research just doesn't pay. You just need to change the complete technology. (just think developing vacuum tubes as mainstream product further instead of replacing them with transistors)
              So, I expect they will get to 5000h, with a lot of luck luck to 10-20.000, that's still not very much. Plus the research doesn't really pay - build a TV that lasts 10 years in perfect condition and the customer won't buy another TV from you in next 10 years.
              On the other hand, reducing the cost to less than 1% the original (note: cost, not price) is quite common.
              • But, if they can push the lifetime of the product to 1000%, as you said is sometimes possible, that is 3 years and change for an 8hr per day usage. Coupled with sane power management policies, it could end up being quite useful, particularly if they can push the price down to the range that CRT currently sits at.
      • If they end up being somewhat cheaper or make up for it in other ways, that may not be a problem. After all, replacing laptops and screens every two years isn't such a big deal given how fast the electronics around them evolve anyway.
        • A CRT only has a rated lifetime of 10,000-20,000 hours, or about 2 years of continuous operation.

          Tell that to the guy who always leaves his monitor on overnight at work (with no power management to power down the CRT).

      • Re:Great News... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by llama_god ( 725883 )
        As far as I know this isn't a problem with the actual OLEDS but with the desiccant. The OLEDS react with water faster than their counter parts so better desiccant are needed for OLEDs than LCD.
      • The perfect display technology is coming from Philips R&D. [philips.com]

        It's based on electrowetting. Basically, one of the three colours of an RGB pixel is made up of a film of oil. The oil normally spreads/clings all over the tiny surface to form a solid color. The surface under the oil is made of a special material that attracts water ONLY if it's under electrical current.

        Now, if you want to remove the oil to reveal the color of the surface under it, you electrify the surface below the oil, the water above the

    • Re:Great News... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Turing Machine ( 144300 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:53PM (#9300435)
      These are MUCH brighter than LCDs, too, if I recall correctly.

      The article says they've got a 15" prototype.

      Maybe we'll finally get a notebook display that you can read in sunlight?

      • Re:Great News... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by fshalor ( 133678 )
        Brightness contrast ratios of above 200 here we go...

        Oh, wait...

        Nevermind.

        I actually have had to do a lot of LCD'ing in sunlight with laptops. It's not so bad at times. Apples do pretty well. And there was a fair number of old dells which worked fine as long as you were in about 15% shadded area.

        There's no point in doing SSTV if you have to lug a CRT with you.

        And I'll not even get started with doing DAQ at surface sites without a GOES transmitter. It's laptops and bug repelant for us for at least anoth

      • Re:Great News... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 31, 2004 @10:24PM (#9300596)
        Brighter than? LCDs have no brightness, its all from a backlight. OLEDs emit light, thats why you can have paper thin OLEDs.. and without the viewing angle problems caused by backlights and their distance from the screen and how they emit light
    • I've always wondered if you'd cause a plasma leak if you punctured a hole in your monitor...

    • Re:Great News... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DaLiNKz ( 557579 ) *
      I have an OLED display on the back of my cellphone. They have the text on it (uncontrollably) revolve/scroll across the screen because if it stays in one place too long, its rumoured to burn.. :\ I feel it to just be a waste of battery.. I would far rathered a colour LCD screen that can turn its backlight off, but still see it in the sun.

  • 1000 hours? (Score:5, Informative)

    by cbiffle ( 211614 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:49PM (#9300411)
    I own one of the Pioneer decks they reference in the article. Its display is positively stunning, though I wish I'd waited a couple years for the color ones that can play MPEG off of the CD. Mmm.

    In the article, though, they list among OLED's advantages "1000 hour life."

    That's 41 and two-thirds days. This is clearly wrong; my stereo's been going strong for nearly two years.

    Just FYI.

    • Re:1000 hours? (Score:4, Informative)

      by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:59PM (#9300481) Homepage Journal
      5h a day, 200 days in a year, that's 2 years. Plus the problem is about the color ones. B&W may get fuzzy at worst. In color ones, colors mix. The display will work much longer than 1000 hours, but the colors will be a bad mess.

    • Re:1000 hours? (Score:5, Informative)

      by MBAFK ( 769131 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @10:10PM (#9300538)
      Couple of doctors thoughts [opticsreport.com]
      Snipped from that page:
      ...Right now, OLED displays are commercially available in cell phones and car radios with lifetimes over 10,000 hours...

    • Re:1000 hours? (Score:5, Informative)

      by El Puerco Loco ( 31491 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @11:49PM (#9300901)
      I think that is a misprint, current displays have a lifespan of ~10,000, and that is currently limited by the blue LEDs, the red and green last ~20,000 hours, so after 10,000 the color balance starts to degrade pretty rapidly. BTW Seiko Epson recently unveiled [forbes.com] a 40 inch OLED display. So this is definitely something that is feaseable now.

    • Re:1000 hours? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by squaretorus ( 459130 )
      It is likely a misprint, meaning 10,000 hours which is a hell of a long time unless you watch it 24 hours a day!

      Even at a thousand or two hours though, if these displays are cheap and 'green' enough I dont mind buying a new one every now and again. I'm pretty sure Ive never kept a car for more than about 1000 hours of actual use (figure 40,000 miles at 40 miles per hour average as a loooooong time to keep a car).

      Admitedly I dont scrap the car, but I sure as hell lose a lot of money on it!
      • ...figure 40,000 miles at 40 miles per hour average as a loooooong time to keep a car

        40,000 miles worth of driving is a long time? Maybe at one stretch, but really, I know very few people who would consider 40,000 miles excessive.
      • I have 54,000 miles on my car right now. I've had it about five years, which, I guess, could be considered a long time. But if my car wasn't any good after 40,000 miles I'd be pretty pissed.

        I know some people do the 3-year lease thing and get a new car every 40,000 miles -- it's pretty wasteful compared to buying a car to drive it for 100,000+ miles. As long as you do regular maintenance and fix small problems before they get big, keeping a car for its full lifetime is very advantageous from an economic

  • Is Organic LED == degradable? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by toesate ( 652111 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:51PM (#9300423) Journal
    If so, what is the MTBF (mean time before failure, right term here?)

    or what is the lifetime of such a LED device?

    Imagine your display goes fuzzy and blurred in the middle of a good film.

    • Imagine your display goes fuzzy and blurred in the middle of a good film.

      Or it just starts out blurry on that brand new 60" plasma.

    • Re:Is Organic LED == degradable? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ad0gg ( 594412 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @10:40PM (#9300673)
      OLED Life is 1000 hours
      LCD life is 45,000 hours
      Plasma life is 14,000 hours
      CRT life is 45,000 hours

      I'll stick with LCD or CRT until plasma or OLED become cheap enough that replacing them is like replacing the brake pads on your car.

      • CCFT backlight (Score:5, Informative)

        by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @11:08PM (#9300768) Homepage
        LCD life is 45,000 hours

        That's really just due to the fact that eventually the CCFT backlight will croak. With most LCD displays, it's just a $15-$25 part and your LCD is back in business. If you factor in CCFT replacement, an LCD monitor should last as long as the controller circuitry keeps functioning - most likely, a LONG ASS TIME.
        • I've heard that too often those flourescent sidelights are hard to find, and are often specific to the model.

          Even so, sadly, I think people would more likely just upgrade the display. 45,000 hours is about five years worth of use, assuming 40 hours a week use.
        • Ok, but I can buy a good Viewsonic (1600x1200) 21" CRT for $175, while a generic 20" (nowhere near 1600x1200, by the way) starts around $675 according to pricewatch.com.

          Between the two, I can tell you which way I'll go, at least for now.

      • two things... (Score:5, Informative)

        by poptones ( 653660 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @11:41PM (#9300870) Journal
        a) where do you find an LCD panel rated at 45,000 hrs? I've never even seen a backlight ccfl rated at that, much less an lcd panel.

        b) lifecycle numbers are under bias. FWIW many electrolytic capacitors are also rated for 1000 hr lifecycles, and you don't see many tv sets just blowing up after 6 months. "Lifetime" typically means "this much time until specifications change X%." For capacitors it's typically a 20% change in value, and this change is not linear - the greatest change comes in the first 100 hrs or so and degrades slower after that.

        Given "normal" program material and use in a true color display "1000 hrs" absolutely does NOT mean "it dies in 40 days." It means after 1000 hrs under bias any given pixel element will lose 50% of its brightness. In a 1/64 duty cycle system this means you can multiply those 40 days by 64 - about 2500 days, or 7 years.

        As someone else has pointed out, the real challenge is getting a reliable means of producing panels with consistent degradation of all pixels over time. If you have 10% of the red oleds fading after 800 hrs and 20% of the green elements fading after 1200 hrs you're going to have a display with splotches of color that, over years, becomes worse and worse.

        Still, this is no worse than LCDs that typically require repair after just a couple of years because their backlight (or the inverter driving it) has failed. At best you can hope for a warning as the color gradually turns pink - or maybe you just turn it on one day and find the screen is "dead." Or your projection set - those bulbs are often a couple hundred bucks, and damn few are rated at more than 2000 hrs lifetime. Given all that, this 1000hrs don't seem bad at all. [sid.org]


        • As someone else has pointed out, the real challenge is getting a reliable means of producing panels with consistent degradation of all pixels over time.


          Seems simple enough given modern digital processing capabilities.
          All you would need is a single receptor, and a willingness to run a calibration test periodically.
          Multiply the brightness of each pixel by 1/(the amount of light that reaches the receptor).

          -- not a .sig
    • Good film, the chance would be a fine thing.

      Films are at the cinima are about 1 dpi, blured to hell, poor contract and flicker like hell, that bit of bluring on you home screen will just help the effect along.
    • If so, what is the MTBF (mean time before failure, right term here?)

      or what is the lifetime of such a LED device?

      Imagine your display goes fuzzy and blurred in the middle of a good film.

      This is not an MTBF question. The problem is that the colours fade with different speed, i.e. the display gets a colour-shift and looses brightness.
      The question of life-expectancy is therefore subjective. MTBF as in failure should be acceptable right now.

  • Size... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:51PM (#9300424)
    One big advantage of plastic electronics is that there is virtually no restriction on size.

    Women: "Damn right."

  • Can it 'display' black? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Overand ( 590318 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:52PM (#9300432) Homepage
    My big gripe with standard LCD displays is the complete inability to truly display black. This leads to a pretty crummy contrast ratio relative to conventional displays and good plasma displas. LCDs are getting better, but OLED might just be what we need. The article desribes it as self-illimunating, though, so I don't see why it can't display true-black, since there's no backlight, but for a technical article, it sure is weak on the details.

    • Re:Can it 'display' black? (Score:5, Informative)

      by mr_zorg ( 259994 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @10:47PM (#9300701)
      Yes, you're absolutely right. Since the pixels in OLED are light-emitting they can display true black by simply turning off -- just light in a CRT display. The reason LCD can't display true black is because they have to block the backlight to render black, and they're just not 100% light blocking...
    • Well, I suspect that simply 'turning them off' may not be as black as you'd expect. Traditional LEDs are actually little metallic bits when they're turned off. Not black at all. Are OLEDs black? I don't know, but I suspect not. Obviously OLEDs have been used in commercial applications and however they are solving this problem the displays are 'black enough' when off. But who knows how this will translate into the harshly demanding world of computer displays?

      I guess we'll find out soon enough, but it's some

  • Black levels, refresh rate: what?! (Score:3, Informative)

    by NSash ( 711724 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:55PM (#9300449) Journal
    Some of the challenges OLEDs have to face:
    * Ensuring competitive refresh rates, contrast ratios, black levels and overall performance

    Why on earth would black levels be an issue for an LED display? I thought that was a problem unique to LCDs, due to their backlighting. Furthermore, I was under the impression that refresh rates for today's LED displays already surpass LCDs; that high refresh rates are a feature of the technology. Is the reporter full of it, or am I misunderstanding something?
    • organic leds are not exactly like silicon leds. They are apparently quite a bit more capacitive than the "conventional" LEDs you are likely thinking of ( which would be expected since they are, after all, made from plastic - a material used to make capacitor dielectrics). this capacitance will either slow down refresh cycles or drive up power consumption. In a home unit you could probably live with the added power consumption to get a great display, in a notebook that might be a bit more of an issue.

      But ev

    • Re:Black levels, refresh rate: what?! (Score:4, Informative)

      by UserChrisCanter4 ( 464072 ) * on Monday May 31, 2004 @10:32PM (#9300629)
      For the same reason that self-illuminating plasma displays have a weak black level: the amount of light they can put behind those colors. The darker the glass is, the brighter a color has to be to penetrate that black and still look decent, hence the reason a lot of plasmas have a "smoke" black. OLEDs will need to be much brighter to penetrate a true black, and balancing that brightness with MTBF will indeed be a challenge.

      Of coursre, all other things being equal, I'll be perfectly happy to forego the heavy power usage of LCDs and the ludicrous power usage of plasma displays.

  • Replace at 6 months?! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by lawpoop ( 604919 )
    "Operating lifetime exceed 1000 hours..."

    Given a 40 hour work-week, 1 month is 160 hours, and 6 months is 960 hours. This sounds ridiculous! I'm in the third year of my CRT monitor, and I don't have the money to replace it anytime soon, esp. not if I have to buy a new OLED every six months!

    • How often does your company buy new printer paper? Do you use fountain pens and ink wells, or cheap ballpoint pens that you throw out every three months?

      If OLED displays really will be so much cheaper, maybe it's time to start thinking of displays as a disposable resource.

    • Same thing with plasma tvs (Score:4, Informative)

      by ad0gg ( 594412 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @10:29PM (#9300615)
      Plasma tvs have about 20,000 hours life [plasmatvbuyingguide.com]. Something to think about when you buy an open box plasma tv from bestbuy or circuit city since its probably been on 14+ hours a day for 6 months or longer. So you'll get about 5 years of life out of it, instead of 10 to 14 years with a new one. I'm amazed that plasma tvs are so common now a days, I see them used as billboards at theaters and malls. These things are on 24 hours a day that means 2 years later they'll need to be replaced.
      • I am sick of this FUD. Please, if you are going to post things about plasmas, at least be accurate. Of the larger plasma makers, most like Panasonic or Pioneer are currently at 60,000 hours until phosphor half-brightness, and the majority of the rest are at 30,000. 20,000 hours was right in 2002, when those stats were published, but just as in computers, things move fast. If I were to quote the state of Linux in 2002 as the current state, I am sure I'd get flamed mightily.

        Sorry if I came out as mad at

  • No problem... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by djupedal ( 584558 )
    They must not only establish themselves, but also beat the leaders in price and performance.

    This sentence seems to assume some sort of independant startup...some sort of 'competition' - which isn't the case at all.

    Seeing as the leading LCD manufacturers (displays, not panels) have been aware of this evolution, and they have the reins in their hands, OLED can come in quickly - no worries.

  • Incredible potential (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HonkyLips ( 654494 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @10:10PM (#9300536)
    An old article on OLED's in Scientific American made me a huge fan years ago... the potential for these things is amazing. Because the base is a polymer, which can be transparent, all sorts of sci-fi style possibilities open up, laptop screens that can be rolled up are just the beginning... HUDs in cars could become standard offering by sticking an OLED screen on the windscreen... office windows coated with an OLED screen would look like normal windows but could double as a TV or computer screen at the flick of a switch.... same for home TVs. Because pixels can be transparent, the RGB layers of a display can be sandwiched on top of each other, meaning that an OLED display will have individual pixels which have their own unique colour- as opposed to current technologies where RGB pixels are arrayed next to each other and rely on the eye to merge separate red, green and blue dots into a "colour". For this reason, OLED displays should be significantly sharper. Yes, a window that doubles as a TV is a long way off but the articles show that the technology isn't just science fiction... it's getting closer every day. One day we'll have windows with DVI inputs :)
    • You said
      "HUDs in cars could become standard offering by sticking an OLED screen on the windscreen..."

      I would think retinal projection on a single eye would work much better for this - because having to focus on the windscreen to see the display is going to be distracting to the driver, while a retinal projection would require no refocusing and would allow you to see the information all the time, while driving, without distracting refocusing.

  • Not much news... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PatHMV ( 701344 ) <post@patrickmartin.com> on Monday May 31, 2004 @10:13PM (#9300548) Homepage
    This press release doesn't really have much new information in it. OLEDs have been around for several years now. And the article talks about printing the monitor on the same glass as a current LCD monitor. One of the real potential benefits of OLED is the ability to print them on a flexible plastic film. Check out this Scientific American article [sciam.com] from back in February.
  • Instead of continually advancing the 2D display devices, why don't we work on 3D. I'm holding out for a hologram projector! I'm sure someone is working on it.
  • I am glad that OLED's are making their way into the market now, but, as my stance is with all technology, I will wait until it matures to be cheaper, last longer, and overall, be better. Remember Wi-Fi when it first came out? Ugh, dreadful. But now, it's a very mature technology that performs great for most people's needs. I have the same opinion on what will happen to OLED's. This has great potential, it just won't be seeing any of my hard-earned dollars until it proves its worth. ~1000 hours isn't worth i
  • Until OLED's can demonstrate very long lifetimes (like at least 25,000 hours) and avoid the screen burn issue that plagues CRT and plasma displays, I don't think they will have substantial market share for widescreen home theater displays.

    Already, DLP has become quite popular for large screen home theater monitors, and LCOS may within the next 18 months offer the benefits of DLP but at substantially lower prices! Also, another nice thing about DLP and LCOS widescreen projection TV's is the fact they have s
    • screen burn issue that plagues CRT

      Have you been living in the wonderful world of 20 years ago? CRT monitor burn-in is almost nonexistant for any modern, decent-quality monitor. You would have to try very hard to get a monitor to burn in these days.

      Rear-projection CRT I don't have any experience with. I hear that yes, burn-in can be a problem with those, probably due to the brightness they need to achieve to project that image onto the screen. But they only comprise a minority of CRTs, and to lump all CRT
      • Rear-projection CRT I don't have any experience with. I hear that yes, burn-in can be a problem with those, probably due to the brightness they need to achieve to project that image onto the screen.

        I've been reading a number of online forums that discuss home theater systems and there has been many concerns about screen burn-in problems with CRT-based rear projection TV's, mostly because of the need to have high levels of brightness to achieve a viewable display in the home environment. This is why DLP an

  • Laws of color mixing suspended (Score:5, Informative)

    by michaelmalak ( 91262 ) <michael@michaelmalak.com> on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @12:54AM (#9301095) Homepage
    From the article:
    ... pixels of red, green, and blue material are applied.

    [...] All colors of the visible spectrum are available

    Somehow [devx.com], I don't think so.
    • I think: ... pixels of red, green, and blue material are applied.

      was supposed ot be: ... pixels of red, green, and blue emitting material are applied.

      Apparently the OLEDs themselves can be made transparent.

  • Grating Light Valve! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Venner ( 59051 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @01:14AM (#9301157)
    I've been following OLED's progress for years and I'm glad they're finally getting somewhat competitive. It's a cool technology.

    For a television, however, there's another really cool technology I'm waiting for to become commercially available (to the consumer: Grating Light Valve based projection TVs.

    Red, Green, and Blue diode lasers (RGB) + a Microelectromechanical (MEM) diffraction ribbon = very bright, detailed, lifelike image. I've heard anecdotally about people who became disoriented because the image looked 'too lifelike.'

    Informaion [siliconlight.com] about GLV display technology.

  • OLED - small molecule or polymer (Score:5, Informative)

    by flend ( 9133 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @04:11AM (#9301673) Homepage
    There seems to be a lot of confusion over exactly which type of OLEDs are currently out there in the market.

    There are two OLED `generations':

    1) Small molecule - these use small organic molecules (think anthracene). They require pretty much conventional vacuum-systems for preparation and hence are expensive. However, they are emissive (unlike LCDs). These are the OLEDs we start to see in cameras etc. Lifetimes are pretty good.

    2) Polymer - this is the 2nd gen - here the manufacturing is all roll-to-roll or inkjet printing. These are going to be the el-cheapo reasonably-nice displays of the future. However, the lifetimes here are a concern - we're talking 15,000 hrs for the best blue polymers which isn't good enough yet.
    • These are going to be the el-cheapo reasonably-nice displays of the future. However, the lifetimes here are a concern - we're talking 15,000 hrs for the best blue polymers which isn't good enough yet.

      But if they are truely el-cheapo, we should be able to replace them like a lightbulb every few months for a dollar or two...
      • Eventually we may get to that stage. For screen technology you require 3 main components - a substrate/electrode (glass + indium tin oxide), a TFT layer for active switching ([amorphous] silicon currently) and then the active part of the screen itself (and maybe a metal electrode which is no big deal).

        Polymer TFT planes and polymer substrates are coming on but, even when we get the active layer polymer right, we'll still need the other two to get real disposible displays.
  • First, it says:
    "# Operating lifetime exceed 1000 hours"

    So does that mean that I will have to replace my new cheap OLED TV after 1000 hours? or that my current LCD will only last 1000 hours, or what? Thats a 24x7 lifespan of a shade less than 42 days.

    Other than that, seems like a good idea, and lots of good cheap applications as well. And considering how the devices are made, could this be a step below cloth displays, or moving posters, etc??
  • call me back when i can buy a OLED monitors, 1 inch holographic memory storage cubes, electronic paper, and Duke Nukem Forever - at Best Buy.

    OLEDs are just the latest vaporware (and no, i don't concider 1 fscking digital camera screen anything else but vaporware), and i've been reading the same damn articles about it for at least 5 years now... this is not gawddamned news...

    i swear - i hold no hope of seeing a 17" OLED monitor before 2010 when looking at the progression of the technology.

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