Basically, he adjusted the voltage on a certain type of OLED, which produces a light very similar to natural sunlight. This is great for photographers, if they can get the wattage up enough to illuminate properly. It’s just an experiment for now, but we could definitely see it coming to market either for photographers or even as a natural light simulator for those suffering from seasonal affective disorder. [OLED-Display via Crunchgear]

The 3D image was of a human rib cage, and it rotated in mid-air. And the holographic rib cage rattled me.

It was my first experience with a Display Of The Future, and it set me on a mission. In the subsequent years, I’ve been hunting down display prototypes, talking with experts, and visiting labs. In short, I’ve been on a quest for the perfect display.

Now You See It

Even though holographic video blew me away when I first saw it, I quickly composed myself. It’s simply not the sort of thing that will be commercially available any time soon.

I talked to Gregg Favalora, 3D expert and founder of Actuality Systems, about the commercial viability of high-resolution 3D video. His company broke resolution records with its display-a 100-million-voxel (3D pixel) device that made images for radiologists and engineers hunting for oil reserves. The details of these 3D images look eerily realistic, but Actuality had a heck of a time finding the right market for it.

In the end, the company only sold 30 systems at $US200,000 each and it has now ceased engineering operations. And that MIT holographic video system I saw in a few years ago is still trapped in the lab. The lesson: no matter how extraordinary your technology, it’s impractical for the people unless you can efficiently manufacture it in large numbers.

I See Practicality

At the opposite end of the price spectrum is LCD. It’s cheap as dirt thanks to the billions of dollars of factories built over the past two decades. I wanted to get a look at the way LCDs are made and try to find clues for how a more interesting or useful display-like a reflective ereader or an OLED screen-could scale up and become cheap.

So I took a trip down to Applied Materials in Santa Clara, California, a company that supplies 90 per cent of the LCD industry with manufacturing equipment. What I saw was impressive: the newest fabs are built around sheets of glass – backplanes of LCDs – that are the size of a garage door. They’re only as thick as six sheets of paper, and each one can yield eight large screen TVs.

The machines that deposit electronics on the glass are behemoths-taller than I can reach and with an area slightly larger than a garage door. In a fab, six of these machines are arrange circularly, and from above they look like a giant mechanised flower. The sheets of glass slide in like a floppy disk into a drive, and come out coated with thin film transistors.

The bigger the glass, the more displays can be pumped out of a factory, and the cheaper all sizes of LCD displays become. According to Sid Rosenblatt, the CFO of Universal Display Corporation, a big fab can make six 50-inch LCDs every three to four minutes. At that volume, how can anything else compete with LCD?

Fitting In

Well, instead of beating them, startup Pixel Qi decided to join them. The company’s screens are all LCD – built on the same lines and with the same materials as any other liquid crystal display – but with an additional mode in which the power-hungry backlight is off, and the display reflects ambient light.

I’ve seen Pixel Qi’s displays and visited with Mary Lou Jepsen, the startup’s founder and the former CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project. Jepsen spends most of her time in Taipei, the capital of Displayland, but on a sunny day last fall, I caught her at her houseboat in Sausalito. It was the perfect time and place to try out an LCD that is most impressive in bright light.

In its reflective mode, the display is black and white, similar to a Kindle or Sony Reader except it’s faster-capable of video, albeit in monochrome. The first batch of Pixel Qi screens is scheduled to come off the line this month. Jepsen says more designs that further reduce power consumption are on the way. In one, she explains that the screen, when not needing to refresh, should be able to shut down the central processing unit(and wake it up within milliseconds when it’s in use).

As for a colour reflective mode, Jepsen says it could be possible in a couple of years. The concept, which involves a particular arrangement of liquid crystals, is based on her PhD thesis, but it’s admittedly a more complex design than the first Pixel Qi screens. Her first priority, she says, is making sure that Pixel Qi can ship its first products quickly and successfully.

Bright and Beautiful

While Pixel Qi might be making cheap displays that are easy on the eyes and energy efficient, they can’t compare to the beauty and simplicity of OLED screens, in which each pixel emits its own light. The whites are whiter, the blacks are blacker, and the overall image is just gorgeous.

Even better, the manufacturing process is as simple as it gets. It’s layer of organic material that can be printed between two layers of electrodes. This means that OLED displays have the potential to fold, roll and be built over large areas.

Concepts I’ve seen: a paper-thin, flexible display slammed by a hammer without breaking, a display that’s see-through when the power’s off, and large area OLED coating that act as a window, a wall, or a display, depending on its mode.

In terms of touch, I’m keeping an eye on a new type of technology that’s being integrated into the electronic foundation of OLED displays and LCDs too. It’s called in-cell technology, and there are a number of variants, but one type incorporates photodetectors into the pixels of a screen. It’s ideal for OLED displays, because it can be added without adding thickness, allowing them to maintain their sleek good looks.

If there were ever a perfect display, OLED is it.

The Holdup

In a conversation with Vladimir Bulovic, a professor at MIT (and star of the famous HYPERLINK “http://techtv.mit.edu/genres/19-engineering/videos/3175-vladimir-bulovic-on-oled-displays” light-emitting pickle video) we waxed poetic on the possibilities of OLEDs. Bulovic believes that it’s only a matter of time before OLEDs take their rightful place at the head of the display industry. The reason we have to wait is simply bad timing. “If back in the 1970s, we had OLEDs, no one would even know what an LCD is today,” he said.

The widely understood problem with OLED displays, however, is that the technology doesn’t exist to mass manufacture them on large sheets of glass like those I saw at Applied Material. Therefore, their beauty is relegated to smaller screens like mobile phone displays, Sony’s 11-inch (expensive) TV, and concept demos.

Engineers are working on the problem, of course. Bulovic told me about a former student of his, named Conor Madigan, who has an OLED-printing startup in Menlo Park called Kateeva. I got a hold of Madigan who said his company, which uses a hybrid approach to printing large-scale OLED display, is well funded (even in these difficult economic times) and the display industry is really starting to push large-scale OLED technology.

While it’s true that big display makers are promising big OLED screens in the next couple of years, I’m not holding my breath. Even when the technology for printing large-scale OLED displays arrives, it will still take significant investments to scale up manufacturing. It’s difficult for companies to justify investing too much money in OLED displays while LCD sales are still doing well and continue to get cheaper. Besides, these large-screen OLEDs will still be made on glass, just like LCD, which keeps things rigid, fragile, and heavy.

Past Glass

In order to have a light, flexible, rugged OLED display, it’s obvious that display makers must go with plastic instead of glass. Plastic Logic, is promising the world’s first plastic-backed screens with printed organic transistors, by early next year.

I’ve handled a proto-version of Que, Plastic Logic’s ereader, at the company’s Mountain View headquarters and was impressed by the form factor. While it’s still rigid, it’s light as a thin stack of papers. And because it’s made of plastic, it’s robust. I felt like flinging it across the boardroom where I sat with the head of marketing and a public relations handler. I didn’t.

Here’s the bad news for Plastic Logic: it all comes back to scalability. At the recent Printed Electronics conference in San Jose, I had lunchtime conversations with people who just shake their head at Plastic Logic’s challenges. A number of them expressed scepticism that the manufacturing process could scale.

Printed organic transistors currently can’t compete in speed with amorphous silicon transistors used in LCDs and OLED displays. And the company’s printing technology is done in a single fab in Dresden, which could make it difficult to produce the e-reader in large volume. In other words, it won’t be cheap or widespread, at least in the near future.

Roll With It

However, the folks at HP Labs think they have a scalable way to make plastic-backed displays with fast silicon transistors. On a recent tour of HP Labs I saw the proof: sheets of plastic, tens of meters long, are rolled onto tubes and are loaded and locked into a system that imprints silicon transistors onto the material.

Carl Taussig, the director of HP’s information surfaces lab, walked me through the process of the so-called Self Aligned Imprint Lithography. Plastic, with a shiny coating, spins on a series of cylinders, where it is exposed to chemicals, ultra-violet light, etching solutions, and ionised gasses. The roll-to-roll setups are compact, and they don’t require clean-room level purity that other display processes do.

Taussig, who is also responsible for inventing the DVD-RW, showed me prototypes, built with HP’s silicon-on-plastic transistors. One of these plastic backplanes controlled an E Ink display. Some of the pixels that were supposed to be black appeared grey, but these prototypes help the researchers find the problems in the roll-to-roll process. If they see a blown-out pixel, they retrace their steps to find where in the process the problem arose. 


In another demonstration, I saw a new type of reflective display developed at HP that was about the size of a smart phone screen. It has colour and video and is one of the best-looking reflective screen I’ve seen. Technical details were sparse (they will come out early next year), but Taussig told me that part of the trick is to make a pixel out of three layers of colour dyes that take incoming white light and reflect specific colours of it back at you, something like the way that butterfly wings reflect light.

Within Two Years

While Taussig doesn’t think roll-to-roll will replace LCD processes anytime soon, he hopes it can help plastic become the foundation for reflective displays as well as emissive displays like those made of OLEDs. HP has licensed its roll-to-roll technology to PowerFilm, a thin film solar manufacturer. And recently, PowerFilm’s subsidiary Phicot has started to commercially developing the process for electronics. The first products will be displays for soldiers that may be integrated into clothing or wrap around their arms.

Combining HP’s roll-to-roll manufacturing with OLEDs and a reflective reading technology is the closest thing to the perfect display that I’ve seen. So I ask Taussig how long it’s going to take to make the process reliable. He’s optimistic that Phicot can iron out the problems soon. “To be successful we need to roll this out within two years,” he says, since the first plastic displays will hit the market in 2010.

In talking with Taussig, it’s clear to me that even though he’s a researcher, he’s focused on making plastic displays practical. He knows the only way to do that is with solid, cost-effective manufacturing. Once the manufacturing problems are solved, he says, plastic displays become inevitable. “My grandkids will never believe that we made displays with glass,” he says. “Everything will be on plastic.”

I can’t wait. The perfect screen will be lightweight, energy-efficient, and able to take various forms – flexible, transparent, and with touch or some other form of gesture recognition. I want colours so vibrant that images look real enough to grab. Still, I want to read on it without feeling like I’m staring at a flashlight. And it’s got to be cheap.

So far, the displays I’ve seen come close. And while nothing yet gets it all right, there are some up-and-coming technologies-and, crucially, emerging manufacturing processes-that give me confidence that the perfect display is on the way.

Kate Greene spends most of her day staring at the screens of her MacBook Pro and iPhone. She became a journalist by way of physics, where she worked in a basement lab with lasers and a lot of liquid nitrogen. Currently, she writes for publications like The Economist and Technology Review and goes on display hunts for Gizmodo. She can be found on the Internet at kategreene.net and on twitter

We told you flexible OLED displays were really coming now, complexity be damned, and this wearable one for your wrist is another example of why we’re totally right.

Taking its design queues from Dick Tracy, Fallout 3, Predator and countless sci-fi flicks from the past couple of decades, the OLED bracelet is the result of a collaborative effort between LG and flexible OLED manufacturer Universal Display.

As for specs, the 4-inch OLED display can handle 1.67 million colours and weighs 8g. The super svelte screen is 0.3mm thick.

And sorry, it’s a prototype, on display at the SID Display Week 2009, so your post-Apocalyptic fantasies will have to wait. [Tech-On via CrunchGear]

Talk of 14.1 and 31-inch OLED TVs from Samsung has been going on for some time now, but decent-sized units have not materialised on store shelves thus far. Hopefully, that will change soon as Samsung deems these new AM OLED sets “production ready.”

The 31-incher is the first OLED display to boast full HD resolution (1920 x 1080). It also features a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1, a colour gamut of over 100% NTSC and a ultra-slim design of only 8.9mm. That’s all well and good, but I will hold off on any enthusiasm until it transitions from “production ready” to plain “production.” [BusinessWire via OLED Display]

It’s simpler than the crazy ion blaster technique Samsung used to produce their flexible OLED display, adapting the “traditional” process of manufacturing OLED displays (UDC uses vacuum thermal evaporation) in a more “benign” way so that it can be implemented directly on a soft piece of plastic, hence the potential for mass production. Essentially, the plastic substrate is glued to a piece of glass while they process it, and then it’s carefully peeled off. What you end up with is an OLED implemented directly on plastic.

That said, while FDC believes “most of the key manufacturing roadblocks have been addressed and it’s time to start thinking seriously about commercial production,” commercial gadgets with flexible OLED displays are still a few years away. And we’re talking like 4-6 inches, not even 8-10 for a bendy tablet thing. On the upside, they think they can get the price premiums down to “no more than 10 percent” above existing display prices within the first 5 years of commercial production. We’ll see.

FDC and Universal Display Corporation Make Breakthrough in Flexible Display Manufacturing Process; Advance Flexible OLEDs Closer to Mass Market

TEMPE, Ariz. – June 1, 2009 – The Flexible Display Centre (FDC) at Arizona State University and Universal Display Corporation (NASDAQ: PANL), today introduced the first a-Si:H active matrix flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display to be manufactured directly on DuPont Teijin’s polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) substrate. Implementing Universal Display Corporation’s phosphorescent organic light-emitting diode (PHOLED) technology and materials and the FDC’s proprietary bond-debond manufacturing technology, the 4.1-inch monochrome quarter video graphics array (QVGA) display represents a significant milestone towards achieving a manufacturable solution for flexible OLEDs.

Flexible OLEDs are designed to target a number of military and commercial applications that require more rugged displays. With Universal Display’s PHOLED technology and materials, the new display achieves the same brightness as traditional displays with extremely low power consumption. Additional advantages of the technology include lower operating temperature due to less heat being generated, easier to drive, longer battery life, and more stable transistors.

“Being a founding member of the Flexible Display Centre, Universal Display is pleased to see the significant progress enabled by our cooperation,” said Mike Hack, Vice President of Strategic Product Development at Universal Display. “Together, the FDC and Universal Display have demonstrated technology paths which will accelerate the introduction of exciting new flexible OLED displays on plastic substrates.”

“This development of flexible AMOLED technology gives the industry a solid starting point towards manufacturing, mass production and commercialization of flexible OLEDs,” said Shawn O’Rourke, director of engineering for the FDC. “The fact that we have achieved a functional flexible OLED manufactured directly on plastic using the Center’s manufacturing process represents a significant achievement, and continued developments over the next few years will lead to full colour, full motion video flexible displays.”

The flexible backplane display was manufactured at the Flexible Display Centre utilizing a 180°C thin film transistor process. The FDC’s facility implements traditional flat panel and semiconductor tools and processes to achieve flexible displays, enabled by its proprietary bond-debond technology to secure the plastic substrate to a rigid carrier during manufacture.

The integration of Universal Display’s PHOLED frontplane delivers a key enabling technology for the flexible OLED. The PHOLED materials allow the OLED to convert up to 100 percent of the electrical energy into light, as opposed to traditional fluorescent OLEDs which convert only 25 percent, providing up to four times more energy efficiency. Universal Display integrated the FDC backplane designed for its PHOLED frontplane to produce the display.
The FDC and Universal Display will present a paper discussing the active matrix flexible OLED on Friday June 5th in session 65.4 at SID 2009. Additionally, the FDC will demonstrate this device and other flexible display technologies in booth # 523 at the show. Universal Display, located at booth #676 at the show, and DuPont Teijin are members of the Flexible Display Center.

About the Flexible Display Centre at Arizona State University
The FDC is a government – industry – academia partnership that’s advancing full-colour flexible display technology and fostering development of a manufacturing ecosystem to support the rapidly growing market for flexible electronic displays. FDC partners include many of the world’s leading providers of advanced display technology, materials and process equipment. The FDC is unique among the U.S. Army’s University centres, having been formed through a 10-year cooperative agreement with Arizona State University in 2004. This adaptable agreement has enabled the FDC to create and implement a proven collaborative partnership model with over 20 engaged industry members, and to successfully deploy world class wafer-scale R&D and GEN-II display-scale pilot production lines for rapid flexible display technology development and manufacturing supply chain commercialization. More information on the Flexible Display Centre can be found at www.flexdisplay.asu.edu.

About Universal Display Corporation

Universal Display Corporation is a world leader in developing and commercializing innovative OLED technologies and materials for use in flat panel displays, solid-state lighting products, electronic communications and other opto-electronic devices. Universal Display is working with a network of world-class organizations, including Princeton University, the University of Southern California, the University of Michigan, and PPG Industries, Inc. Universal Display has also established numerous commercial relationships with companies such as Chi Mei EL Corporation, DuPont Displays, Inc., Konica Minolta Technology Centre, Inc., LG Display Co., Ltd., Samsung SMD Co., Ltd., Seiko Epson Corporation, Sony Corporation, Tohoku Pioneer Corporation and Toyota Industries Corporation. Universal Display currently owns or has exclusive, co-exclusive or sole licence rights with respect to more than 940 issued and pending patents worldwide.

Obviously, though, the flash-equipped camera is the star of the show here, and while relentless megapixel one-upmanship is fruitless and annoying, the Pixon looks like it’ll be a decent pocket shooter despite its narrow obsession. Touch autofocus lets you choose a focal point with a finger tap, after which the camera will automatically keep focus on its subject. Shooting speed is quicker than average, clocking in at about two seconds per shot. A bevy of online photo services are supported out of the box, and video recording, though not HD, records at a respectable 720 x 480.

The 150MB internal storage is glaringly weak for a camera-centric phone, though I suspect, as is usually the case, that carriers will bundle SD cards when the Pixon finally goes on sale, which will be in June in Europe, and August elsewhere—though not necessarily here. Sorry, Idou! [OLED Info and Akihabara News]

I’ll CC You in the FL
With LCDs, it’s all about the backlighting. This defines contrast, brightness and other performance metrics. When you watch plasma TVs, OLED TVs or even old tube TVs, there’s light emanating from each pixel like it was a teeny tiny bulb. Not so with LCD—when you watch traditional LCD TV, you’re basically staring at one big lightbulb with a gel screen in front of it.

The typical old-school LCD backlighting tech is CCFL—a cold cathode fluorescent lamp—which is an array of the same kind of lights that make people’s lives miserable in offices around the world. The reason they aren’t the greatest as backlights for TV watching is that they light up the whole damn display. Because LCD is just a massive screen of tiny doors that open and close, light inevitably leaks through the closed doors, when they’re trying to show black, resulting in more of a glowy charcoal. Check out this shot from Home Theatre mag to see what I mean:

LEDs (light emitting diodes) are different from say, an old school incandescent bulb, which heats up a filament to generate light, in that they’re electroluminescent—electricity passes through a semiconductor and the movement of the electrons just lights it up. Instead of having one lightbulb in the bottom of the screen, shining up through all of the LCD pixels, you can have arrays of LEDs that shine through smaller portions of the LCD screen, leaving other portions in the dark, so to speak.

OLED—”organic light emitting diode”—is slightly different. Since the electroluminescent component is organic and not a chip, each point of light can be much tinier. That’s why an LED TV still needs the LCD screen in front: there’s no way to have a single LED per pixel unless the screen is huge, and mounted to the side of a building in Times Square. OLEDs don’t: HD OLED displays are made up of red, green and blue dots, no LCD panel required.

LED Is As LED Does
So, Samsung’s term “LED TV” is more accurately—and more commonly—described as an LED-backlit LCD. But not all LED displays are created equal.

There are two major kinds of LED backlighting: Edge-lit and local dimming. Edge-lit displays are what they sound like—the LEDs are arranged in strips running along all four edges of the TV, like you can see in this gut shot from Cnet. A light guide directs the glowyness toward the centre of the screen. The advantage of edge-lit displays is that they can get incredibly thin, are 40 percent more power-efficient than regular LCDs and are a bit cheaper than local-dimming TVs. But because they’re still shooting light indiscriminately across the LCD panel, they can’t pull off the black levels that a local dimming backlight setup can.

LED backlighting of the local dimming variety is how you build the best LCD TV in the world. It’s called local dimming, as you probably guessed, because there are a bunch of LED bulbs—hundreds in the Sony XBR8—arranged in a grid behind the screen. They can all be dark or brightly lit, or they can turn off individually or in clusters, making for the actual Dark Knight, rather than the Grayish Knight you’d see on many cheaper CCFL LCDs. Sets with local dimming are pricier than edge-lit—the Samsung’s local-dimming 46-incher started at $US3,500, versus $US2800 for one of their edge-lit models. They are thicker too.

What Colour Is Your LED?
The colour of the LEDs matters too, separating the best LED-backlit LCDs from the the merely great. Most LED sets just use white bulbs. The reason Sony’s XBR8 started out at $US5,000—as much as Pioneer’s king-of-TVs Kuro—is because it uses tri-colour LEDs in an RGB array. In each cluster, there are two green bulbs next to one red and one blue (greens aren’t as bright). The result is high contrast plus super clean, incredibly accurate colour.

LED displays are getting cheaper, more quickly than originally expected, so we could see them go mainstream sooner. You already see the lower-end edge-lit LED tech used in mainstream stuff—MacBook Pro and Dell’s Mini 9 to name a couple. Which is a good thing, since the prophesied ascendancy of OLED in 2009 completely failed to happen. So we’ll have to make do with LED in the meantime. Just be sure to find out what kind when you’re buying.

Apple iPhone Apps, a site with no known track record (which is also down right now) just leaked a July 17 release date and a bunch of specs for the next iPhone. They look fishy.

The July 17 release could technically be possible, since it’s on a Friday and Apple’s been releasing their iPhones on Fridays, but the specs are weird.

* 32GB and 16GB storage (up from the current 16GB and 8GB models)
* $US199 and $US299 price points to be maintained
* 3.2-megapixel camera (up from the current 2-megapixel camera)
* Video-recording and editing capabilities
* Ability to send a picture & video via MMS
* Discontinuation of the metal band surrounding the edge of the device
* OLED screen
* 1.5 times the battery life of the current models
* Double the RAM and processing power
* Built-in FM transmitter
* Apple logo on back will glow
* Rubber-tread backing
* Sleeker design
* Built-in compass
* The camera, GPS, compass and Google map combined will identify photo and inform about photo locations
* Turn-by-turn directions

So what’s weird? The OLED screen, for one. The 1.5x battery life, for two. And a rubber-tread backing/sleeker design for three. It’s still quite cost-prohibitive to use OLED screens on devices, and it’s difficult to see how Apple could shrink down the size of the device to make it “sleeker” while at the same time making the battery 1.5x. Maybe because they’re using an OLED screen?

It’s all very pie in the sky, so don’t take it as literal proof that the next iPhone will have this. And the rubber tread backing may or may not be this leaked image from MacRumors, which isn’t quite rubber, but more of a matte feel than the current version. [Apple iPhone Apps via 9 to 5 Mac]

Researchers from the University of Tokyo have created OLED displays that have all the durability of a super ball.

Suspended in a flexible matrix of carbon nanotubes and rubber, the new OLED displays can be stretched an additional 50% of their normal size and wrapped around complex, 3D surfaces. No, they aren’t paper-thin like other prototypes we’ve seen and the graphics are currently monochrome, but these OLEDs appear to be incredibly practical for everyday use. Plus, the displays can be manufactured through an industrial printing process that should make the technology inexpensive to boot…you know…some day…or never…or tomorrow…or something. Neither children’s toys nor condoms will ever be the same. [Technology Review via KurzweilAI]

On Sony’s “SonyRewards” site, the X1000-series unexpectedly popped up with a price, albeit in Sony’s “points” currency. But if we convert from Sony points to, you know, actual money, the X1000 will come in at $US299 and $US399 for the 16GB/32GB versions, respectively. That’s exactly the same as Apple’s price on its equivalent iPod touch models.

The X1000-series includes a lot of features the iPod touch doesn’t, like the all-important OLED screen, noise-cancelling technology, an FM tuner, and Sony’s vaunted sound quality, but the iPod touch has been an established smash hit for years now and we wish Sony would have undercut to make more of a splash. This is just a rumour, at the moment, but an appearance on an official Sony site is pretty solid evidence that these will be the final prices. [Sony Rewards (16GB, 32GB) via Engadget]