IFA still hasn’t even opened yet, but a few companies have been having informal “come look at our stuff!” booth tours. One of the bigger ones today was LG‘s, and this here is probably the flashiest of all their wares: a 31-inch OLED television that’s only 0.29mm thin. I can practically hear the LG managers yelling at their engineers, “Under 0.3mm or you’re all fired~!” → Read More
Get it, brilliant? Okay, I’ve had my fun. Down to business. The concepts in this gallery at Inhabitat are designs exploring potential of a certain size of OLED panel. The one above was designed by Emory Krall for Universal Display. The idea of razor-thin, low-heat, easily dimmable lighting like this is exciting to me. Why do I love lamps so much? → Read More
Just a quick note in case you’ve been gnawing your keyboard in anxiety: yes, people are still working on making OLED displays better. And bigger. There have been scaling issues, but the big display companies have spent the last year or so fiddling around with the little tiny displays (and enormous ones) and as a result, have achieved some level of “know-how.” They are going to use this “know-how” to create “real products,” presumably OLED TVs and displays. But will they be 3D?! Inquiring minds want to know! → Read More
Remember SEDs? Those surface-conduction electron-emitter displays were around for quite a while, competing with FEDs (field emission displays) until Sony decided to pull the plug on the latter back in March last year. That gave one company, Canon, enough of a push to continue to believe in SED. Canon even filed new patents on SED technology in the US in May 2009. But that’s over now (we kind of anticipated this as early as December 2008). → Read More
OLEDs, which are said to lead the next wave of innovation in the TV space (after back-lit LCDs and 3D displays), come with plenty of advantages: they produce gorgeous images, they are self-luminous, light, and they’re flexible – very flexible. Case in point: a super-thin, Sony-made 4.1-inch OLED that actually wraps around a pencil, shown today in Japan. → Read More
OLED televisions are notoriously expensive and difficult to make; but like all technologies there is always someone working on making the technology cheaper. DuPont recently announced the development of a new process that prints OLED screens in sheets, much like a inkjet prints on paper. → Read More
Say what you want about it (too expensive, too small etc.), but I’ve always liked the world’s first commercially available OLED TV, Sony’s XEL-1. It’s just an 11-inch screen and costs $2,200, but the picture quality is just gorgeous. Today, however, Sony announced they won’t produce and sell the device on the Japanese market anymore. → Read More
There is nothing more satisfying than claiming to be the first at anything, and so far this week, Samsung must be pretty happy with itself. After announcing its plans to mass produce AMOLED touchscreens, the first to include built-in touch functions, Samsung’s S8500 will be the first consumer handset to feature Bluetooth 3.0. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, or SIG, has approved version 3.0 for the handset and also slipped out a few details on the phone. → Read More
Standard, boring LED screens: your days are numbered! Samsung announced today that it will begin mass producing AMOLED displays with touch functions built right in. The displays will be 3.3″ WVGA touchscreens that will be, thanks to the AMOLED technology, much thinner than your average touchscreen display on current phones. The beauty of this technology is that it produces thinner, brighter and more vivid displays because it doesn’t require the additional touch input layer on top of the screen. Samsung managed to place a touch sensor over the mirror display and made it evaporate, leaving just a 0.001mm thick sensor over the display. → Read More
Yes, Mitsubishi. We’re all very impressed with your 149″ OLED TV (even though it runs at a ridiculous 1024×640), but we also know that thing is one-of-a-kind and proves nothing. Why don’t you skip the showboating and put out a couple sweet displays people might actually want to use in their homes? I know they’d be expensive, but someone would buy them because they cost less than infinity dollars. And you can fit them through doors. The pic above is a non-real OLED display from last year, and still the only OLED in my possession is in the Zune HD. [via OLED-display.net] → Read More
My buddy Lou tells this story: he was with his girlfriend at the time and he got a call from a couple they knew. They couple invited them over for “boardgames and wine” and Lou said “Sure.” Then his girlfriend told him that they were not going over for boardgames and wine because, in that couple’s special code, “boardgames and wine” as some sort of weird partner swapping game involving lots of booze.
Anyway, a professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, Roel Vertegaal, showed off a concept board game that uses OLEDs on each piece, allowing you to play games like Settlers of Catan and Candyland with interactive aspects built right into the pieces.
Click through for a video. → Read More
Asus leaked some information recently about their upcoming e-reader, the DR-570. Not content to be a “me too” with the standard black and white e-ink product, it looks like they are going to be coming out with an OLED offering that might just kick the rest of the e-readers to the curb. → Read More
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. → Read More
If you’ve looked at buying a television the past several years, chances are you’re well aware of the terms: Plasma, DLP, LCD, and more recently, OLED. Well, there’s a new acronym in town: LPD.
Developed by the Silicon Valley-based Prysm, LPD is being formally unveiled today as the latest type of screen technology. LPD stands for Laser Phosphor Display, which likely means nothing to you, but the company is promising that it’s a tech that will allow them to create massive, crisp digital displays that consume some 75% less power than the other display technologies. The company claims these displays are also much cheaper to build, and will last longer. → Read More
I question the actually utility of this, except for in corporate ID badging. It is cool though, combining OLED, RFID, and 3D into an ID. Plus, how is that for an alphabet soup of acronyms? Thanks to NetbookNews for the tip. → Read More
So far, I’ve avoided the CFL and LED light bulb revolution. The savings, it seems, come around in the second year, which means that whoever has my apartment next will have a reduced power bill. I could always take my light bulbs with me, but that seems a bit miserly. Besides, my power bill is like $5 a month and 90% of that is my fridge and my desktop.
But these Orbeos OLED lights are as bright and efficient as any LED or CFL, but are both warm, diffuse, and dimmable. I might choose them over regular bulbs just because they have the best of all worlds. → Read More
OLED can still pretty much be considered a thing of the future, but we’re getting closer to use the technology in our homes every month. Today, Casio Computer announced [JP] it has teamed up with Tokyo-based technology company Toppan Printing to develop and produce OLED panels. The new joint venture will start operations from April 2010, with both companies involved saying they’ll focus on manufacturing OLED panels sized ten inches and smaller first (like the one you see in the picture). → Read More
OLED has had issues gaining traction mainly because of the cost of manufacturing large screens. People like large screens. That’s the fact, jack. Anyway, Mitsubishi has developed a system that seems like it would help. It uses small, modular panels that can be combined to make a screen of nearly any size or shape. The system is intended for outdoor advertising, but if it matures enough, I don’t see why it couldn’t find a home in the home entertainment market either. → Read More
You would be hard pressed to find an OLED TV in any brick and mortar retailer besides the Sony Store right now. The technology is amazing, but they just aren’t available yet and that might not change soon according to a iSuppli report. The TVs are too small and the prices are too high to gain any real traction. But, as we all know, that will change as the display tech evolves. However, don’t expect to see a wall full of OLED because the LCD market isn’t slowing down. → Read More
