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Organic LEDs to Supercede LCDs? 122

Posted by michael from the matchbox-quake dept.
Hootie Hoo writes "Tech Review.com is reporting that a new screen display method may soon make LCD screens a thing of the past. Organic light-emitting diodes are brighter, thinner, lighter, and faster than liquid crystal displays. They also take less power to run, offer higher contrast, look equally bright from all angles and have the potential to be much cheaper to manufacture than their conventional counterparts." We had a story about these LEDs last year.
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Organic LEDs to Supercede LCDs? More

Organic LEDs to Supercede LCDs?

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  • Re:again ? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Semi-colons denote a break in the thought being expressed in a sentence; they do not denote the beginning of a new sentence. Thus the first letter following a semi-colon is not, generally, supposed to be capitalized.

    Two can play at your game. If you want to nitpick others, try to at least be free of that which you criticize people for.

  • Here's a link for OLED information (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Universal Display Corporation [universaldisplay.com] does OLED R their site has information about the variations on this technology (FOLED, SOLED, TOLED, etc.)
  • Organic displays don't come from animals, they grow on trees.
    No little fluffy rabbits are hurt, it's just like eating an apple.
    But perhaps you don't know: the vacuum tube on normal CRTs is made by a very cruel use of kittens. That's why all CRT are produced in Asia, they don't care much for cats there.
  • We didn't have all these new-fangled colour screens, 32-bit processors or email when I was young. We had a cardboard box with "Computer" written on the side, but we were happy.
  • Kind of like that electronic paper? It has small balls which are white on one side and black on the other. Passing a current accross them makes them flip, creating a black or white point on the paper. I guess in theory you could produce red, green and blue balls, and vary the amount that they get flipped, making a colour display.

  • IBM's linux watch uses OLED's (Score:3)

    by JimRay ( 6620 ) <jimray&gmail,com> on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @05:50AM (#337792) Homepage
    IBM's second generation (but still completely useless) linux watch uses an OLED for all the reasons mentioned here: bright display, low batter consumption, etc. Check out the CNet article [cnet.com].
  • Actually, it's the same LEP's. (well, in part) Same basic materials. They're just still getting better. So it isn't that their claims didn't pan out, but that development is still going forward. Now actually usable displays are being made, even if not competetively with LCD's. 5 years ago it was all talk. Seems to me things are on track.
  • Simply taking the light from point a and passing it onto point b on the diametricall opposite side works as a method of invisibility _only_ if you have a static viewing angle. If the viewer looks at you from a lightly different angle, point b is no longer diametrically opposed to point a and the illusion is obvious.
    _____

  • Re:so what (Score:5)

    by Bearpaw ( 13080 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @06:12AM (#337795)
    Yea, that's great, but when will they be on the market for the average jo to buy one?

    Last September.

    From the article: "The first phone to hit the market with an organic light-emitting diode display is Motorola's $300 Timeport P8767, which went on sale last September."

  • MIT has some research on some kind of electric ink - it looks like an ordinary paper but you can light [the equivalent of] pixels. Last I heard, they only had greyscale.

    A few links:
    Salon article [salon.com]
    E-Ink [eink.com]
    More info should be available at www.media.mit.edu [mit.edu], but it seems to be down for the moment.

  • And in the wilderness... (Score:4)

    by Aggrazel ( 13616 ) <aggrazel@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @04:45AM (#337797) Journal
    A horde of lightning bugs all grab their asses in terror.
  • I've already got the blue balls, but I'm not too excited about getting the red and green balls...

  • Polymers == chains of carbon molecules. Cabon based molecules == organic. Carbon chemistry == organic chemistry. "Organic stuff" == polymers == carbon based molcule chains == organic chemicals. Pay attention in chemistry class.
  • I believe the term for these was OEL displays (Organic Electro-Luminescent)
  • Conceptually that sounds easy. Since what they do is rotate a tiny ball in its socket (one side black/ the other white) all you need to do is paint each ball with four different colors (e.g., CMYK). There might be a problem with intensity, as I'm not sure of the size of the cuff of the socket, but then perhaps that's transparent.

    FWIW, I'm not certain that this system is the one that you are talking about, but it's one of the approaches. Called smart paper, or some such. The problem is, black/white is just North/South. Magnets do that easily. Getting the finer discrimination is a bit trickier.

    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • Electronic ink already exists in prototype. There's a store in Boston that uses a multiple-message sign utilizing it. :)
    I'm really looking forward to consumer applications of it, too - finally, no more having to carry around pounds of books on vacation...


    "If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.

  • Re:again ? (Score:3)

    by trcooper ( 18794 ) <coop@@@redout...org> on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @05:36AM (#337803) Homepage
    This one isn't vaporware. While it's certainly mis-represented in the /. article, organic LEDs are intended right now to be used mainly in cell phones. You can actually purchase one of these puppies Today [airtouch.com]. They're looking at low use devices right now because of problems with the life of the display. No one's claiming that it will replace your laptop screen tomorrow.

  • This is what Transmeta needs to be successful (Score:4)

    by RebornData ( 25811 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @06:27AM (#337804)
    As is pointed out 1000 times in the responses to any article about Transmeta, reducing processor power consumption alone won't give you a notebook with great battery life. The display has been a big reason for that.

    If OLEDs live up to their promise, low-power processors like Crusoe will become much more attractive.
  • Or the other side.

    People are used to laptops which run for 2-3 hours, with a processor performing heroic measures to keep it going.

    If this screen can stretch it to 10 (for example) on a normal CPU, who will care if a Crusoe can push that to 15? 10's still comfortably more than a working day.

    Tricky one to call, but I wouldn't want to be a Transmeta investor unless I knew they had more tricks up their sleeves than Crusoe.
  • I get about 4 hours out of my Thinkpad A21 battery.
  • because you are a standard Slashdotter,

    The big draw back right now seems to be the useful life of the display. The numbers given by the article are a current maximum of around 1,000 hours for the blue, 100,000 for the red and 30,000(?) for the green.

    My question is, would it be possible to make the displays cheap enough that they would be disposable? The article talks about advances that may make it possible to print the displays on presses much like a newspaper is printed. Would it be possible to put the control circuitry in a holder, with the OLED and substrate being on a removable plate that slid in and out? If the display replacement could be dropped to around $20, I would replace it every few months (and get used to a red/green display when funds are low 8*)

  • Actually, the article did make a mention of animals in reference to current LCD screen technology: "Full-color displays also require expensive red/green/blue filters made of dichromated gelatin--fish glue." So I would imagine that PETA will recommend a laptop boycot soon ;-)

  • Because... (Score:5)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @10:08AM (#337809) Homepage Journal
    color increases the information density of a display. Take a good road map and photocopy it in black and white. It is still usable, but much less so. For PDA mapping, color is essential, since so much more data must be crammed into less area.

    When used simply as decoration color can be a problem. Used with restraint it has excellent applications, such as the simple way blue and purple underlined text are used to represent links on a web page. Of course if the text is spangled with random color and typographic oddities then color capability would be a drawback, because its just one more distracting miscue.

  • does anyone, anywhere up there have a spell checker? I mean; supercede? Supersede is the only word in English that ends with "sede". This has been a paid public service announcement from the grammar police.
  • A company called Alien Technology [alientechnology.com] has developed a very low power display technology that looks very promising. There was a write-up in the February Scientific American about it.
  • I can safely say that they are not a hoax, they just have a sense of humour. Inside their lobby they have Robby the Robot, which they now own. They had an open house a few months ago where they had several cast members from various Star Trek shows sign autographs. It made the local news media.
  • Actually, at that point you'd need cyan, magenta, yellow and black balls---for printing on paper one uses a subtractive colour model rather than the additive RGB model.
  • ... from Kodak

    I want. Unfortunately, to get it today, you have to move to Japan [japaninc.com], where most cool tech hits the consumer world first.

  • I want. Unfortunately, to get it today, you have to move to Japan [japaninc.com], where most cool tech hits the consumer world first.

    Oops; memory fault. I should have reviewed that bookmark before I posted it; the 'today' part is false advertising. However, it is still good English coverage of the Japanese phone displays that are mentioned briefly in the techreview article.

  • Lower power consumption means that the thing requires less power. It does not directly mean that things will be built with the same size batteries. With the decreased power consumption, manufacturers can scale down the size of the batteries, meaning it costs them less to manufacture, and bringing down the overall weight and size of the device.

    This has more significant advantages on things that aren't constrained by keyboards and hard drives. PDAs are a prime example. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'd guess that batteries are a significant amount of the weight in many of them.

    If they do pull this off, and it's not another LEP (Light Emitting Polymer [cdtltd.co.uk], which made the cheaper/lower power/better viewing angle/no backlighting/higher res claims 5 years ago), then I'd personally rather have them take a single battery, and give us twice as many battery slots. [Single batteries suck, as do ones they are keyed by the bay, as you can't rotate through 3 batteries easily]
  • Actually, they should be the same brightness unless you haven't properly adjusted your white and black level controls, referred to on most monitors as "Brightness" and "Contrast", respectively.

    To adjust them properly, get your computer to display an all black screen, and starting with the black level all the way down, turn it up until you just start to see the display get brighter. Then display an all white screen and adjust the white balance until it's the same brightness as a piece of paper/whiteboard/etc held up next to your monitor. BTW, the color temperature control should be set to whatever makes the paper and the white screen look the same color.

  • Gah, not enough large cell-phone screenshots available for that Timeport.

    ah, here [motorola.com] is some more info.
  • Yeah, print it out on a printer, then realise that your oled cartridge has a blocked pin so it doesn't work.

    I can see HPs future range:

    Plain Black Cartridge
    Color Cartridge
    Photo Color Cartridge
    Monochrome OLED Cartridge (works on T-Shirts!)
    Color OLED Cartridge

    One day the OLED Cartridge will cost less than the photo cartidge.... :-)
  • You mean 100,000 hours for red, 30,000 hours for green and 1,000 hours for blue, don't you?

    Which means that you could get some wicked yellow/red/green displays that will last over 3 years before the green starts giving out. Great for mobile phones and PDAs in my opinion.

    Especially if they are higher res than the current technology. A Palm in yellow-scale will suit me fine, if it is running at 640x640 :-) Especially with red and green highlights available.
  • hey,

    after they red burns out, you could put some of that red reynolds wrap over it and just pretend :)



    --
    microsoft, it's what's for dinner

    bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com

  • mlp (Score:3)

    by ravrazor ( 69324 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @05:08AM (#337822)
    You can find out more about OLED from the company working on it, Universal Display Corporation [universaldisplay.com]
  • Gasp!

    Another amazing - change the world - technology was posted to Slashdot! OK. Time to hold my breath.
  • From the article:

    ... their structure is about as simple as one could imagine: an electrode, some organic stuff, then another electrode. Hook it up to a voltage and, presto, out comes light.

    Does anyone know precisely what this "organic stuff" is? The article mentions polymers, but I'd like a more specific description.
  • Yeah.. Let's never ever do anything more than once. Went out partying last week, why should I go out anymore.. oh wait, it was fun. And there is always something new like different people.. Last year was three months ago at the earliest. Even without any new information it is still an interesting topic.
  • This article, to me, falls into the same category as those holographic storage articles we see on Slashdot so often. While the technology does exist, it needs to appear in an actual consumer product before we give a crap about it! I first heard about OLEDs about five years ago, in Scientific American, talking about how they'd revolutionize yadda yadda.

    Fer chrissakes, can someone PLEASE make a 19" flatscreen monitor that uses these? I know everyone would appreciate it :)

  • It seems to me that Scientists should consider the words of the holy bible when designing technology that exploits animals, for although man is given dominion over all creatures, he is also instructed not to inflict 'undue suffering'.

    Just because they use organic materials doesn't mean that they torture the animals to death. In fact, I'm not even sure they use animals... the article didn't give any mention of where the organic material for the new displays comes from (the old LCD technology, they said, used "fish glue"). The organic material for the new displays could just as easily be coming from plants (plants which were not doubt tortured to death).

    It's also possible that if they were to use something like "fish glue," that they would aquire the needed material via the cheapest means possible, like buying waste material (heads, tails, skin) from a food processing plant (e.g., VanDeKamps).

  • Speak for yourself, I have always loathed black text on a white background. You call yourself a geek and then claim allegiance to features of dead tree displays?

    Feel free to say "we" all breathe air, or that all of us are alive when we are existant and non-dead. Don't assume I enjoy having my montor blasting vast quantities of unwanted luminescence at my skull though.


  • Sorry, I forgot to include the standard link to babelfish [altavista.com]. We shouldn't think that everybody knows what we know...
  • Hi, there was an article (in german) [heise.de] yesterday on heise.de about plastic displays on Cebit, so if you happen to be there today or tomorrow, you might want to see them.
  • What if one of them gets sick like the gelpacks on Voyager did that time?
  • By the way, the grammar in you post is terrible.

    Hmm, talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

    ChodaBoy
  • I just read about this in umm... err.. The magazine "Science" I believe, and it all sounds great. Brighter, thinner, faster, cheaper, less power, etc... I was extatic.

    Then, they let out the bombshell at the end of the article. They only last for something like 1000 hours of use (i.e. 1000 hrs of time accumulated while on).
    That just sucks. The article did mention that they would use them first in cell phones, because the actual usage time of the display would be adequate for the typical life of a cell phone (I suppose if they figure that people replace them after 2 years or so).
    Now, if these displays can really be a WHOLE lot cheaper than LCD displays are now, maybe they can produce and integrate them such that you can just pop out your old used up display and pop in a brand new one. I wonder if they can be re-charged somehow - i.e. you can send them back to the factory to be refurbished.
  • There's no reason it can't incorporate a light source as well, which can be turned off when not needed.
  • it's a competing technology to OLEDs called iFire [ifire.com]. It uses something called TDEL or "thick dielectric electroluminescent" technology. The screens are created with "screen printing" process that applies the substrata using a very cheap and efficient method.

    It may prove in the long run to be cheaper than OLED technology, however, it is neither as bright (right now) nor can it be made flexible like OLEDs (at least not from what I understand).

    Check it out [ifire.com]

    -- kwashiorkor --
    Leaps in Logic
    should not be confused with

  • I wonder what the potential is here for using these OLEDs in the nascent 3d video displays... any experts care to theorize?

  • Alien Technology may be a hoax. From their site: [alientechnology.com] "One of the visitors from Klingon reportedly commented that "I seldom come to Earth - even to Silicon Valley - because there is so little useful technology. Alien, however, may have developed the most important technology since the Romulans developed cloaking. We are considering an investment of up to 1 million bars of gold-pressed latinum in Alien's current financing round.""
  • No, paper has a much greater dynamic range than any display. Black on paper is much darker than the "black" on a CRT or LCD, which can get no darker than the gray that shows when the display is off. Also, under many lighting conditions, paper is brighter than a CRT or LCD display.

    Try it! Hold a piece of white paper next to your display. Which is brighter? Unless you are in a very dimly lit place, the paper will be brighter.

  • it would be interesting if an inkjet could print such screens - imagine printing the screen you like on paper and then, while the paper is still wet, press the screen against your own body (your skin) and then attach a very small computer to the output wires (also printed and pasted onto yourself) and you have a living organism-chamelion. The invisibility is then just one step beyond - all you need is some cameras spread around the surface evenly. The cameras would capture the way the surrounding environment emmits light and would reemmit the same light from the opposite side of your body. So if someone looks at you from any side, they see you but you are like a repeater - you reemmit the light that was comming at you from the other side and so the observer would only see what he/she would have seen if you weren't even there. (Of-course it would not be easy to make this completely bullet proof, since you are not a flat surface but there are lots of cavins and cave-outs, but a close enough effect could be attained, that would look something like the alien from Predator (another Schwartznegger's movie))
  • Dont you see how important it is that we can make little plastic lights out of different stuff? It`ll literally transform computing! You no longer have to have a red light telling you that the tv you are watching is turned on - it can be any colour! This stuff is gonna shift units you mark my words!
  • ...and why did the linux watch get stamped with the stigma of uselessness? Sure it has a low battery life (4 hours), but then again, so do most laptop computers.
  • No, no, no... you are missing the point. Think in terms of bottlenecks with power consumption as the object of performance optimization. The crusoe has optimized part of the system, but the screens for most mobile computers are bottlenecking the power consumption process.

    So just like Intel had problems justifying selling newer "faster" CPUs, because of FSB bottlenecks, and addressing the FSB bottleneck became a growing concern for Intel, because otherwise, the end user wouldn't notice significant performance improvements when they bought the latest and greatest pentium. ...Transmeta is probably hoping that someone addresses the power consumption bottlenecks. It is definitely a good thing for Transmeta.
  • Why would anybody _need_ to chug out 60 FPS? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the human eye a bit slower than that (30 FPS or less, IIRC)? If your hardware can keep up a steady 30 FPS, even in the worst of fragpits, why worry? Seems a bit of a waste if you ask me. Interesting piece along the same lines of this post - http://209.221.153.90/hate/lang/suck.html
  • Thanks. I didn't know that...I'd always heard that 30 was it, no strings attatched. Makes sense though. Now I just gotta build a rig that can handle 60 FPS...heh. Eh, well, not everyone's computer can be a demigod, too bad I'm one of the 'not everyone'.
  • Its great to see they are using new organic LEDs - they work so much better than the ones covered in pesticides... Anyway. The real, real question is have they managed to get refresh rates fast enough to play games yet? I see 'faster', but not enough details to see if it can keep up with 60fps Counterstrike games. Going back to the recent story about grips, LAN parties are held back mainly by the monitor bulk, not machine size.
  • Its marked as 'flamebait' because it is. 'Organic' simply means that it uses organic compounds. NOT animals. Did you skip chemistry at school?
  • As the AC says, 30fps would be fine for smooth movement, but only if we have motion blur. 30 to 60 fps on a non-motion blurred render is really really simple to see - ages ago, 3dfx did a demo for the Voodoo2 of a splitscreen 30/60 fps scene, to persuade people to upgrade their cards to what was, at the time, considered overkill.

    On the other hand though, at one point someone (I think it was Carmack if I remember) tried comparing a 200fps scene to one that was rendered at 200fps and then this used to form a motion blurred 30fps, the latter was fine.

    My original point though was that current LCD screens have enough refresh delay that a quick pan in a 3d game turns the screen into a hideous blur, rather than allowing you to see detail as it flies past. When running past high contrast objects in a 3d game it can be difficult to see people entering the edge of the screen.

  • Re:Why Color? (Score:3)

    by silicon_synapse ( 145470 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @04:56AM (#337848)
    I agree color displays are currently hard on the eyes. What I would LIKE to see is a color display that doesn't emit ANY light. I want the pixels to change color and appear as any normal object, not a big flat light. Books don't emit light, why should a computer display? I know, I know. Easier said than done. If I'm still breathing when such tech comes around, I'll be one of the first to grab it.


    --

  • So now scientists have found yet another way to exploit animals for profit. I wonder if anyone ever stopped to consider the ethical implications of organic leds, or of organic computing in general ?

    Think for a second, Petunia. Like non-organic computing is so great the environment, and other living things? there's a lot of bad chemicals/other crap that gets dumped from making computers and displays. MAYBE going organic will CUT THAT DOWN A LITTLE BIT.

  • The real ultimate display (Score:4)

    by NoNeeeed ( 157503 ) <slashNO@SPAMpaulleader.co.uk> on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @07:28AM (#337850)
    The problem with these is that they still have to emit light. There are two problems with this. The first is that they use power (not much, but some). Second (if my memory of my User Interface Design course serves me right) the eye is not designed to focus on emmitted light, it prefers reflected. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, but it is why it is nicer to read a book, than a computer screen (if you ignore the refresh problem). LCDs, while being able to work on reflected light, just loos too much of the light they reflect, too many layers or something (have to ask my sister, Phd in LCD physics).

    The ideal display would be one where you could have a surface that had good reflective properties and could be dynamically changed. I know that MIT are working on a n ink system that you can effectively turn on and off by running it through a kind of laser printer, allowing you to repeatedly re-print onto a piece of paper (I think they managed to reprint hundreds of thousands of times without degredation). If you could do that quickly without the extra machinery then you would have the perfect display, god knows how you would get colour though. mabey some kind of electrically sensetive pigment. Obviously you would have to light it, but only as much as a paper book.
  • Part of the problem is that there's an awful lot of readers here who would say something along these lines and mean every word of it. Hard to tell the difference between a troll and an idiot, though the correct response is the same for both cases :)

    --
  • imagine printing the screen...on paper...press the screen against your own...skin...attach a...computer to the output wires...you have a living organism-chamelion.

    Rudy Rucker [sjsu.edu] anticipated this in his novel Software [amazon.com] . He called it flicker-cladding.

  • What I would LIKE to see is a color display that doesn't emit ANY light.

    The screens used in the GameBoy Color (and Advance, for that matter) and the iPaq are completely passive, reflective-only color LCDs. That is why you can play Tetris in the sun and still see it. The screens work really well, and I'm kind of surprised they don't make full-sized monitors out of them.
  • I may have been trolled but didn't anyone else find this funny?
    Oh, I forgot. You're Americans. You think that "Irony" is an adjective.
  • Ok, but being Organic, what does it cost to feed and care for them?
  • IBM's second generation (but still completely useless) linux watch uses an OLED for all the reasons mentioned here: bright display, low batter consumption, etc.
    You missed one significant advantage to OLED: resolution. That IBM watch has a resolution of 640x480 packed display which is 0.87x0.65 inches. That's a resolution of around 740dpi far better than anything a CRT or and LCD can acheive and even better than most home printers.
  • How dare they treat "organic compounds" in this manner! Has P.E.T.A. been notified?

    Or would it be P.E.T.O.C. that needs to be notified"?

  • Re:again ? (Score:3)

    by grammar nazi ( 197303 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @05:03AM (#337858) Journal
    Give it some time, waspleg. Advances in materials science that lead to things such as thinner and cheaper LCDs take time. Now that we have thinner LCDs, it will take some time for materials science to make it cheaper and then it won't be vaporware. The /. LCD stories are still very interesting.

    You should respect the materials scientists and materials engineers. They don't make things; They make things better.

    By the way, the grammar in you post is terrible. Please us capitalization and punctuation in all of your future posts.

    Thank you.

  • Just because you equate organic to animals doesn't mean that the only source of organic material on the planet are animals. What about petrochemicals? Those molecules are organic, does that mean that oil is an animal? NO of course not that would be silly. Many organic molecules can be synthesized in a lab, with no animals being harmed, tortured, or put through any discomfort. The Article made no mention of animals or religion, so where did the "animal rights/anti-religion issues" come from?


    Sorry about replying in almost entirely questions.

    Assumption first blinds a man, then sends him running

  • Looks like a moderator has had a sense-of-humour bypass... (or a sense-of-humor bypass, depending upon which side of the pond they happen to be at the time).

    Ho hum.

  • Personally, I only use free-range LED displays, and only ones that I personally pick out of the herd.

    Refresh rates and certainly brightness are real issues here - I agree. But one thing I'd like to see is what is under my soon-to-be (shurley) recovered deskspace when the behemoths are moved out for the new flat panel...

  • Maybe now we have a technology that's bright and crisp enough to make panels like they have in Star Trek. Now all we have to do is invent Warp Drive.

    Kurdt
  • Or a wheel-mouse. I screwed up a couple moderation points due to the wheel. I clicked on my desired moderation, the list went back into the box, then I tried to scroll down to the remaining comments. As I hadn't clicked ouside the scroll box yet, the wheel scrolled through the selections. The display didn't scroll and I didn't have a clue what was up until it showed where I'd used my moderator points.

    Since I can blame it on myself, or on Micro$oft, I guess I'll go with latter!

    ------------------------------

  • I've heard of two types of "electronic paper", one uses black & white charged balls (developed at parc [xerox.com]) the other uses capsules filled with ink and little white charged particles. ("electronic ink" [eink.com]

  • I agree color displays are currently hard on the eyes. What I would LIKE to see is a color display that doesn't emit ANY light. I want the pixels to change color and appear as any normal object, not a big flat light. Books don't emit light, why should a computer display?

    While this would really be interesting to see, I think it would be extremely annoying very quickly.

    Most computer systems can be used in daylight or in the dark. You can carry one from inside a dark building, out into the daylight, and (if the monitor and backlight are good), still read the screen.

    But with the technology you're talking about, you'd need an external light source in many situations. What with devices getting more and more portable, how likely is that to become popular?
  • There's no reason it can't incorporate a light source as well, which can be turned off when not needed.

    Yes, these already exist, they're called MONITORS. ;-)
  • It's all a function of perspective; a display that emits light in the RGB colorspace or reflects light in the CMYK colorspace can be functionally identical, because in the end they are both measured by the light your eyes absorb. The only advantage that a lighted display has is that it has a much broader dynamic range than a piece of paper; it can get brighter than ambient light.

    Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
  • I've looked in to OLED technology, and indeed the claims are pretty impressive. But there is a downside, particularly when it comes to power consumption.

    OLED's burn power only when on - with white using by far the most juice. Black is almost free.

    Therefore - if you run white text on a black background, you get great battery life. Black text on a white background (what we are used to) sucks battery like no tomorrow.

    Unless the public will accept a switch to white on black interfaces (or hey, an amber screen works great!), OLED's will have limited application in battery powered devices.

    Better luck next time....
  • Just remember though, if you're moving, then you'll be obvious by, well, the slew of cameras pointing everywhere at you!!

  • More OLED Info... (Score:3)

    by imadork ( 226897 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @05:58AM (#337870) Homepage
    ... from Kodak. [kodak.com]

  • OK. So you write a little thingy that reduces all color to grayscale and then adjusts it to "amberscale" (or whatever color you feel like).

    You can even put it in a cover and put that between your box and the monitor if you like.

    Why, if there are more people with your problem, you might even make some money!

  • maybe then my laptop battery will last long enough to finish a DVD.
  • *turning sarcasm up*

    It really does! I never would have thought that someone would ever would have found, or claimed to have found a suitable replacement for LCDs. Exspecially one that was brighter, thinner, lighter, and faster than liquid crystal displays. Not to mention they take less power to run, offer higher contrast, look equally bright from all angles and have the potential to be much cheaper to manufacture than their conventional counterparts." This is amazing news! I'm sending my VISA information so I can be the first one to have one.

    sheesh

  • People Eating Tasty Animals?
  • I read the story about these last year. Why are they posting it again. There's nothing new to say. However I was thinking there might be some coolness if we use these in places besides replacing LCD screens. For example replacing all LEDs with organic ones. Look around you right now and take note of every LED you see. Now replace it with an organic one. Also have you seen those lighting systems that have a bed of LEDs in the basement and then a bunch of fiber optics bringing the light to every room in the house. Thing about the energy savings if every house has a bed of organic LEDs! No more lightbulbs because LEDs don't die.
  • I frankly prefer an amber LCD display. Amber is scientifically proven to be the easiest color on the eyes. When I'm simply writing code, reading e-mail, or browsing the web I do not see the need for the expense of a color display. Frankly, the only thing color displays are good for at all are video games.
    ---
  • ...but professor...my monitor was sick!!!
  • ...I do not see the need for the expense of a color display...

    Pardon me, but Amber is a color.

    Oops I did it again.

  • How else could the above post be considered 'flamebait' ?
  • I found it funny too. But then I posted it - anyone who actually read the posting would realise it is a blatantly obvious troll. But that never stops people from replying. They cannot seem to stop themselves.

    Plenty more humo(u)r like this can be found at Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] and at Geekizoid [geekizoid.com] and at slashdot [slashdot.org] itself.

    Be warned, you might want to turn off automatic image loading in your browser. I'll say no more.

    The well organized but very secretive Troll High Council calls this: "Education through Misinformation."

  • hehe. that sounds painful ;-)
  • Problem is, when you get that new flat panel, you'll probably want it parked just behind your keyboard, where the front of your monitor is now. Sure you've got storage space behind it, but you can't use it as desktop. To actually improve the desktop space, you need a flat panel that is considerably larger than a monitor, so you can hang it on the wall behind your desk and still read the fine print.

    Being an engineer, what I really want is a 3 x 4 foot touchpanel display, mounted as a drafting table... 8-)
  • Small ones for cell phones are actually in production now. RTFA! (Read the Fine Article)

    Of course, that still leaves several years of development before full size OLED displays are available, if ever... But it's certainly a step forward.
  • What do they mean by organic displays? Are there going to be microscopic fish living inside of my monitor? Am I going to have to take my laptop to the vet every four months for checkups? Will the fish evolve into futuristic supermonsters and destroy everything I hold dear? And what about the ethical issues of trapping little fish in a panel to serve our bidding? The risks seem too great.

  • ... Meanwhile, the organic viewscreen has grown it's need for energy immensely, pulling energy from all dilithium crystals and now also life support ... Spock frowns...

    Scotty: "Captain, we've been trying to revert the power from the deflector shields to the viewscreens, but they need more power, I suggest we feed the power cells of the viewscreens with squished twinkies and donuts to feed their power needs, after all they are organic!"

    Kirk: "make it so,, Scotty, and check our license from MicroRomulan for those screens again eh?"

  • IBM [ibm.com] was reported to have developed a Linux-based, 44g wristwatch using organic LEDs. Their second generation watch could last 6h between recharges (doesn't seen so good...)

    Actually, it's a concept, but they've already crammed a 640x480 display in it. The pixels are so close they claim to be able to reproduce grayscale. Hope it gets more energy-friendly, so we can get X running :)

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