For display geeks, it’s been a thrilling past few days—complete with the eventful SID convention.
Among the goodies was the ‘first’ flexible OLED display, from Sony, which offers a video. But who’s first? L.G. Philips is showing off its own flex OLED.
See Wikipedia on OLEDs. A little progress toward true waterproofing for e-book gizmos, perhaps? More seriously, OLEDs can display vibrant colors and be thrifty with power, among their other virtues. Look, Ma—no backlight!
Of interest, too, are MagicMirror flexible E Ink from PVI and improved phone displays and superthin e-paper with luminance added
(Thanks to Bob and Alex at MobileRead.)
It’s good to see that, finally, a lot of innovation is taking place in the thin visual display (“flat screen”) arena. It appears long overdue.
Back in the late 90’s, I predicted that in 5-10 years we’d see “flat screen” technology and manufacturing mature to the point of near-commoditization — where durable, low power, flat screens of very high resolution would cost only a few dollars per square foot to “roll out” in mass quantities. I bring up this prediction of mine since a certain individual keeps publicly throwing that prediction in my face, in an ascerbic manner, whenever I discuss flat screen technology (apparently out of spite, otherwise why would anyone bother to continue spending an inordinate amount of time, effort, and ascerbity bringing this up?)
Anyway, in the late 90’s my prediction appeared to be quite plausible. At that time we were seeing the other major computer components continue to improve in performance — by quantum leaps no less — while greatly coming down in cost: in particular CPU, memory and harddrives. So why not flat screen display technologies? Adding to that there were several flat screen technologies of great promise being actively researched in the labs, as well as techniques to mass produce traditional LED screens (one company doing research in this area a few years ago was Rolltronics.) I believe e-ink and OLED were first conceived of at the time, if not earlier.
Obviously, flat screen display technologies have not improved both performance-wise and cost-wise to the extent that we’ve seen with the other components. Maybe it was because there was not as strong of a market driving force that existed for the other components (thus less R&D money was spent.) Or that there were major, and unforeseen, technical hurdles that only now are beginning to be resolved.
I’d like to hear other’s thoughts explaining why flat screen technology has not seen the same level of breathtaking improvements in performance and cost that we’ve seen for CPUs (“Moore’s Law”) and for harddrives. I’m quite curious why my prediction from the late 90’s has not yet been realized — I do believe it will, eventually.