FlexView found its master... the end of FlexView?

[beeblebrox]

Folks,

recently I came across a stand on an electronics exhibition and saw the most beautiful displays ever:

Samsung OLEDs, 17", 1600x1200 pixels, reaction time 0.01 ms (compare that to 16ms standard), 180° viewing angle, width 5 mm, contrast 1000:1

Have a look at this Samsung page (ok, it's hard to read, but the photos are stunning)

http://www.digital-world.de/news/video/ ... 477/2.html

And the best: Samsung starts production in Q1/2005
Now: is Samsung not a main supplier of displays for Wistron and Quanta? And are both not the original manufacturers of the IBM ThinkPads?
Makes me think....

[Zeitgeist]

[quote="beeblebrox"](ok, it's hard to read, but the photos are stunning)
quote]

...I find it very easy to read...

[Kenn]

Yeah, OLED displays are fantastic. fast, sharp, bright, and thin as hell (no backlight required). Unfortunately, they're horrible in direct sunlight and they tend to fade to green/blue after just a few years, which I hope is a problem that has been fixed.

[monty cantsin]

Folks,

recently I came across a stand on an electronics exhibition and saw the most beautiful displays ever:

Samsung OLEDs, 17", 1600x1200 pixels, reaction time 0.01 ms (compare that to 16ms standard), 180° viewing angle, width 5 mm, contrast 1000:1

Have a look at this Samsung page (ok, it's hard to read, but the photos are stunning)

http://www.digital-world.de/news/video/ ... 477/2.html

And the best: Samsung starts production in Q1/2005
Now: is Samsung not a main supplier of displays for Wistron and Quanta?

If I am not mistaken, Changcheng International Information Products Co.,Ltd (= IIPC, 80% owned by IBM, 20% by the Great Wall group, a state enterprise and a spin-off of China's Ministry of Electronics Industry) makes most of IBM's "quality" notebooks.

http://www-900.ibm.com/cn/employment/iipc/

And are both not the original manufacturers of the IBM ThinkPads?
Makes me think....

I don't want to have such displays until the major problems with the OLED technology (lifetime and sensitivity to moisture) are solved. What's the lifetime of this Samsung screen? That's the most interesting question for me, but I can't find any information in the article you referenced.

The main obstacle preventing OLEDs on the market is the bad lifetime of the organic emitting layers. The research of improving the lifetime is focused on finding better encapsulation and new materials with better power efficiency. The most critical material is the blue emitting layer. The difficulties to produce blue emitting materials with a long lifetime are due to the high energy needed in order to achieve a blue light.

http://www.ep.liu.se/exjobb/itn/2002/mt/008/exjobb.pdf
(p. 69)

Another problem is the lifetime of the OLED materials. In the display industry, lifetime is measured as the length of time it takes for the display to drop to one-half its initial brightness. Last year, red and green OLED materials had lifetimes of only 10,000 to 15,000 hours, but the big problem was that blue materials had lifetimes of less than 1,000 hours. This meant that the color of the panel would shift rapidly toward yellow as the blue materials dimmed.

Both corporate and academic research efforts have gone a long way toward improving the lifetimes of OLED materials. Red and green materials now last for 20,000 or more hours, though blue materials continue to lag behind.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1566182,00.asp

Absolute life expectance is not actually the biggest issue with OLED as, unlike LCDs which use colour filters over identical pixels, OLEDs are vulnerable to differential aging.

"The big problem for colour is red, green and blue emitters degrade at different rates," says Cobb. "Two years ago, one firm was getting through four displays a day on their stand at a show." They had to swap displays as colour-shift was obvious within hours of switch-on even though the life of its weakest OLED material was rated at 2,000 hours, explains Cobb.

In glass displays, lifetime is becoming less of an issue.

Cambridge-based display technology firm CDT is developing polymer-based OLEDs which it calls PLEDs. Blue PLEDs have the shortest life on the CDT pallet.

"Blue life has increased eight or ten fold in the last 18 months," CDT marketing manager Terry Nicklin tells Electronics Weekly. "At the May SID conference this year we showed 35,000 hours lifetime [from 100cd/m² to half brightness for blue, last month we demonstrated 70,000 hours for blue."

These figures compare with 210,000 hours for red and 200,000 for green, he says.

Ritek, says Trident's Cobb, is claiming 50,000 hours for its monochrome production OLED displays once they are removed from their protective packaging.

The need for such packaging hints at another issue. OLED's chemicals and some of the electrode metals necessary to make an OLED display are ruined by exposure to water or oxygen.

Glass is virtually impervious to these, largely removing them from the life equation in ridged OLED displays except at the edge-seals. Plastics however are porous to both and need to be coated with impermeable barrier layers to block water and oxygen penetration.

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/articl ... leID=37936

[JHEM]

...I find it very easy to read...

Ja, keine problem!

Regards,

James

[JHEM]

Yeah, OLED displays are fantastic. fast, sharp, bright, and thin as hell (no backlight required). Unfortunately, they're horrible in direct sunlight and they tend to fade to green/blue after just a few years, which I hope is a problem that has been fixed.

The probelm hasn't been fixed, just postponed a bit as they're hoping for a three year lifespan on the displays.

I don't see OLED displays hitting the mainstream laptop market until the problem is addressed more suitably.

Regards,

James

[taphil]

Also, 262,000 colors isn't very good for a computer display.

[beeblebrox]

well, it all reminds me of the times, when we worked in our labs on those [censored] blue LEDs. They never had any life expectancy of more than a few days, oxidized immediately and the silicon nitride was hell to work with.
Somehow we managed to produce a 3 colored LED that worked for a few days, just enough to produce faint white light. And that thing was EXPENSIVE!

Well... today I use a cheap white light hi-brite LED torch that I got for $5,99 and smile about old days.

Same with OLEDs, they have been 18 years in R&D, starting with a faint green glow in a lab. Now get a Kodak camera that uses OLEDs.

And specs are not so bad. A lifespan of 3 years at the beginning is really good. They claim 70.000 hours for blue in your article, that's almost lifetime. I never had a ThinkPad LCD screen, that survived 3 years. They all got white spots, broken lines or just went black, or oxidized.

Those OLEDs are just printed like with a bubble jet printer and certainly [censored] cheap when in mass production.
I am not aware of any LCD that can produce 262.000 or more colors. Most have only 16-18 bits, which equals max. 262.000 colors.

Wistron (the ACER production line) makes the Thinkpad X40 as far as I know. I think the cheap A and i series were from Quanta (not 100 % sure), and some from LG.

Anyway, once you have seen that huge OLED display, you wanna have it, even if it lasts only 3 years. It compares to LCD's like a Porsche to Saturn.

[ThinkPad]

That is an impressive screen

[benz]

3 years is actually a long time for a technological product that would use such a display, so in reality the customer would want an upgrade to better technology before the device fails....new cell phones have already started to use OLED displays, and we all know cells are basically throw-away items these days, as the changes in technology warrant an upgrade almost every year (or less, for some people)

[monty cantsin]

They claim 70.000 hours for blue in your article, that's almost lifetime.

Beeblebrox, obviously I don't have that expert insight into the technology as you do, but are you sure? One of the articles reported that on a show older screens with an expected lifetime for blue of around 2.000 hrs had to be replaced continously just after a few hours because they already had degraded visibly. And then these 70.000 hrs maximum for blue with the current technology are a guestimate for an operation at 100 cd/sqm, but the Samsung screen is rated at 400. If I understand the problems with the OLED technology correctly, this higher luminosity will result in an even quicker degradation.

High brightness level require the display driving voltage levels to be increased which trades off expected lifetime. For most OLED materials, the relationship between driving voltage level and lifetime is nearly linear.

http://www.nd.edu/~gsnider/EE698A/Ying_Cao_OLED.pdf

And then the end of lifetime is defined as the state at which the brightness of the screen has dropped to half of the original value. I'd rather tend to believe, tough, that most customers settling for such a high-class display with OLED technology would already regard a screen that has lost a quarter of its brightness as being fairly worn-out.

Wistron (the ACER production line) makes the Thinkpad X40 as far as I know.

Yes.

I think the cheap A and i series were from Quanta (not 100 % sure), and some from LG.

Actually I believe that most models of the i Series (not all) were made by Acer (at least most of them have an ALi chipset, which is very untypical for IBM).

Anyway, once you have seen that huge OLED display, you wanna have it, even if it lasts only 3 years. It compares to LCD's like a Porsche to Saturn.

Actually I'm quite satisfied with the TFT screens, and I didn't have one yet that failed on me (with the exception of a unit that developed a bright spot because I squeezed it too much).

[taphil]

I am not aware of any LCD that can produce 262.000 or more colors. Most have only 16-18 bits, which equals max. 262.000 colors.

24-bit LCDs found in most/all computer displays nowadays can produce 16.7M colors, even the ThinkPad LCD.

[monty cantsin]

I am not aware of any LCD that can produce 262.000 or more colors. Most have only 16-18 bits, which equals max. 262.000 colors.

24-bit LCDs found in most/all computer displays nowadays can produce 16.7M colors, even the ThinkPad LCD.

I'm not so sure. Can even modern TFTs really display more than these unique 262.000 colors today, without the use of any optical tricks?

http://www.pctechguide.com/07panels_Creating_colour.htm

[Elhabash]

There is another thing in the pipelines: LCDs with LED backlighting. They are supposed to be very brilliant and use less energy for the light source, and also should be brighter. Unless I am ignorant and mixing things up here...

But looking at the OLED panels, LED backlighting would only be a transitionary technology.

By the way, I believe that the panels in the Thinkpad displays are made by Samsung. There are not many panel manufacturers, as far as I know it's Samsung, LG/Philips, and just very few others. Maybe some insiders might clear up this issue a bit?

[monty cantsin]

By the way, I believe that the panels in the Thinkpad displays are made by Samsung. There are not many panel manufacturers, as far as I know it's Samsung, LG/Philips, and just very few others. Maybe some insiders might clear up this issue a bit?

Well, I'm not really an "insider", but how about having a look at the HMMs? According to the HMM, in the T4* series IBM uses ID Tech, Samsung and LG panels.

[BillMorrow]

FWIW, along with the rest of this extremely interesting thread, i was looking at LCD TV's saturday evening, at circuit city, and was surprised to find that the samsing was the best, over the sony (specifically) and others, nearby..
LG came in a close second..
samsung had the clearest and best colors..
so much so that i don't recall the brands of the others, aside from sony and LG, just the usual gang of brand names..

the samsung TV was a 26 inch selling at $1799..

[beeblebrox]

I am not sure whether Sony is doing LCD displays, I mean they have only recently started a joint venture with their supplier SHARP, the world's largest LCD maker, and try not to get left in the race.

In my ThinkPad I got an IDtech screen (IBM technology), while my old Samsung became yellow quite quickly.

Note: LEDs have a far higher power consumption than cold cathode tubes, which are the most energy efficient light sources around. But I guess LEDs make a lot of sense, having a life time of 50 years without much fading or changing color, do not brake, and you can put LEDS around your screen to better illuminate the displays, not just on bottom and top.

AND: they come quite handy these days... I just imagine the christmass illumination around my screen
Just kiddin..!

I saw btw. that IBM also presented an OLED screen, 22" and something close to 6 megapixel. I will check for the document...

[Elhabash]

beeblebrox, what I am talking about are LEDs actually behind each pixel. That's why it's not out on the market yet, and it might take a while still. From what I read they are quite advanced in the miniaturization, though.

But power consumption might be an issue after all. I don't know.

[beeblebrox]

...behind each pixel?

That's physically impossible. LED's are gallium nitride chips that are bonded to connectors. Blue ones need silicon nitride. They are quite large (app. 1mm2). and you would have to create a matrix. Super-expensive and physically note feasible due to space contraints.
Absolutely impossible!
No, they talk about backlighting the whole thing, which makes sense and you get a very even bright illumination.

Cheers,
Zaphod

[Elhabash]

Well then, I must be ahead of time!

I thought I read that miniaturization is advanced enough to actually have such small LEDs. I will go behind the books again...

So what I was probably reading about was just LED arrays (one LED for many pixels) to replace the tubes used at the moment?