Sony to pump ¥22bn into OLED production
Fat cheque for skinny display tech
Sony will spend ¥22bn (£105m/€140m/$205m) on OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) panel production, part of its attempt to position the ultra-thin display technology as the successor to LCD.
Sony's XEL-1 OLED TV: small screen, big price
Sony plans to spread the cash across “middle and large size OLED panel production technology”, starting from April 2009. Sony hasn’t said which size displays fall within this category, but has said that the money will be invested in TFT (Thin-Film Transistor) and electroluminescent layer coating processing facilities used to make OLED displays at the Sony Mobile Display Corporation’s factory in Japan.
Eventually, Sony expects the investment to see OLED panels implemented in TVs and AV products within its Sony Home, Personal and Professional Displays product divisions. It’s already unveiled an 11in OLED TV, dubbed XEL-1, which is just 3mm thick. However, the company will need to rejig its pricing strategy if it wants Joe Blogs to buy an OLED telly, because the XEL-1 currently costs around $2500 (£1000/€1300).
OLED displays have been in development for many years, but production costs have prevented the displays becoming affordable as large TVs for the masses. The screens are said to offer more vivid colours than existing flat panel displays, whilst also consuming less power. Register Hardware’s explained the technology in full in a feature on future-display technologies.
COMMENTS
Doubt OLED useful for computers just yet
With the present technology the power-saving comes from the fact that the power scales with the total light emitted by the screen. Since TV content contains the full range of colours (and films tend to be rather darker, closer to 20% "load" on average) you save power compared to an LCD which burns the backlight regardless of content.
In a typical PC application with mostly full-white backgrounds you'll probably use slightly more power than an LCD (present generation technology), similarly aging will be a bigger issue with higher average brightness (and the fact that the high brightness will make it run hotter, further accelerating the aging), and significant static image-content will be a burn-in problem (eg Windows' taskbar).
I'd be very surprised to see PC OLED screens any time soon.
cost
We're talking about products that are in development. One of the big promises of OLED technology is low cost of production; potentially an order of magnitude less than current technologies.
Missing something
Yep, you are probably missing the fact that you can use TVs as monitors.. they're basically just the same thing, but TVs have decoders and usually speakers too..
RE: Do you think they might use OLED with computers?
Absolutely, but they're already able to produce 11" screens (albeit very expensively), so they could do this now if the price was right.
I guess the current push is to produce the screens large enough to use in the more lucrative home-telly market, and prices for mobile phone and laptop-sized screens will naturally reduce.
