We’ve noted before that LED lights are, while energy efficient, a bit cool in color, leading to the “my house looks like an operating room” effect. There have been attempts to warm them up (with “quantum dots”) but this panel looks a hell of a lot more promising, even if it’s not particularly bright.
J.H. Jou, a Taiwanese researcher, has found that with a particular species of OLED, he can vary the voltage and produce a huge portion of the temperature gamut:
…this plain driver-IC can automatically modulate the voltage to render any desired color temperature between 2200 and 8000 K…
If they can get these bright enough, it’d be a huge boon to photographers. Although we work in RAW now for the most part and can change the color temperature of the whole image, individual light setups with different temperatures are integral to setting up a scene. These panels won’t reach the brightness of the megabulbs used in cinema lighting for a while, but the variable color temperature will certainly make them worth keeping tabs on.
[via OLED-display.net]