technology firegeezer on 04 Oct 2007 05:09 pm
The OLED’s Are Here
SONY ANNOUNCED MONDAY THAT THEY WILL be bringing their new OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) television onto the market in December. At first it will be only available in Japan, but you can count on it hitting North America shortly after.
The OLED technology allows a television screen that is only 3mm thick, not much more than a heavy coin. Their first model, the XEL-1, has an 11-inch screen and an introductory price of $1,700. But the technology exists for much larger screens and they won’t be far behind.
Not to be outdone, Toshiba President and CEO Atsutoshi Nishida, announced that the they would have their own 30-inch OLED screen on the market in 2009, while it previously had slated such availability of Toshiba OLED screens for 2015 or 2016.
Since OLEDs are self-emissive and do not require backlights, the Organic Panel consists of several hundred nanometers of organic material, with very thin glass panels on either side. This enables the very thin form-factor of the TV.
Since the light emitted from the organic material layer can spontaneously be turned on and off, OLED technology is capable of very rapid response times. Newly developed OLED drive circuits enable “XEL-1″ to reproduce fast moving images such as sports scenes smoothly and naturally.
And finally, if that weren’t enough, the absence of a separate backlight means that OLED TVs consume extremely low levels of power compared with other display devices. The power consumption of XEL-1 is as low as 45W. The new OLED TV will last 30,000 hours, about 10 years for someone using the TV eight hours a day. An equivalent Sony LCD TV lasts twice that long.
This video shows the Sony display at the world electronics show that was held last weekend.
on 01 Jan 2008 at 11:37 am 1.Fire Gear Cleaning Guy said …
This is awesome. Is there any word on the price of the OLED display? I had heard that a nanotube display was on the way that should drive the cost of HDTV sets way down. This OLED display sounds like something I would be interested in.