Sony promises 27in OLED screen
27in display within 12 months
Sony has revealed plans to launch a 27in OLED screen within 12 months, but the bad news is that it’ll be expensive.
Speaking at a US conference, Howard Stringer, the electronics giant’s CEO, said that by May 2009 Sony “will come out with a 27in version”. Stringer didn’t reveal where the set would appear first or how much it would cost, but, unsurprisingly, he admitted that such a large size OLED would be “expensive”.
By contrast, Sony’s 11in XEL-1 OLED currently costs around $2500 (£1250/€1600). That’s despite a leading analyst firm’s recent tests on the screen confirming that its lifespan is only around half that of what Sony claims it to be.
Sony demonstrated a prototype 27in OLED back in January, which boasted a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and 1080p resolution.
The larger screen size production is undoubtedly the beginning of Sony's ¥22bn (£105m/€140m/$205m) ongoing investment into OLED, which it announced earlier this year.
COMMENTS
Re - Display Quality
I'm still waiting for a HD ready TV that can display moving pictures in HD as well as stills. The only display technology capable of doing this at the moment is CRT, so why doesn't anybody produce a HD ready CRT TV!!! SED and OLED are both capable of matching the CRT in fast response time, but both seem to have unending development problems and are likely to be initially expensive, so let's go back to CRT until it's sorted please.
Cutting edge=Bleeding edge
You can go through thrift shops in rich neighborhoods and see what happens to overpriced, underengineered stuff from the big manufacturers. Eventually it gets replaced with stuff that works and doesn't cost nearly as much (or nearly as much per diagonal inch in the case of televisions).
I'd wait a little while before buying an OLED display, if only because I DO remember how wonky the first large plasma and LCD displays were. Curve balls resembled snowy meteors, color registration wasn't all it could have been... I'd invest in more proven, highly developed technology, with better image quality. But that's just me.
@ Steve
The Greenies will be buying them to save the environment, another selling point to them is that they use less power that normal LCD's owing to no "Constantly on" Back Light. OLED technology has been used in mobile phones for years, they seem reliabale enough.
As with all new technology Early adopters will be punished. They will pay a lot of money for something that will be cheaper and more reliable in 6 months time.
Re: Flat displays still all look worse than CRTs to me...
Well IMHO the main sources of trouble are
(a) resampling to the resolution of the display [often some weird size like 1366x768 unrelated to any TV standard]
(b) colour quantization, which can interact badly with compression artifacts to produce mosquito noise
Both these things are features of digitizing the picture, and can be helped (or made worse) by clever signal processing; but I wouldn't expect OLED to make any systematic difference compared to LCD.
At least it should have better contrast ratio, viewing angle and efficiency than LCD. Pity about the poor lifetime. And the cost...
Nick
i was waiting for this tech...
finally bit the bullet and got a high end LCD 42" after realising they are miles off large screens.
bought 2 'BT domus' cordless phones a few weeks ago. they use OLD screens. both phones' screens died in less than 2 weeks!
wow, now that is a short lifespan!
