(OLED stands for organic light-emitting diode.)
Les Polgar, president of Eastman Kodak's display products group, who I visited last week, foresees a crop of cell phones and digital cameras this spring that will be much easier on the eyes. How? By donning tiny, flat, active-matrix screens based on a display technology that Kodak has pioneered.
The screens in question are known as OLED displays. (OLED stands for organic light-emitting diode.) Instead of creating images out of liquid crystals, these displays form them from arrays of 300,000 sub-pixel-sized lightbulbs.
(Note that a bunch of other companies--including Cambridge Display Technologies, DuPont, Lucent, and Philips Electronics--are also working on OLED technologies of their own; the question of who pioneered what is the source of some dispute.)
In about five years, I predict you'll not only be seeking laptops and PDAs with OLEDs on board, you'll also be asking the guy at Best Buy whether or not the TV you want has an OLED screen.
While OLEDs have been a long time coming, the LED part has been around for years. Light-emitting diodes have been doing everything from blinking out the digits on clocks to pitching replays on the local stadium Jumbotron. They work by passing a charge through a semiconductor, getting the electrons therein to release photons, and, thus, make light.
THE BIG BREAKTHROUGH in OLEDs is the "O." Instead of silicon, the diodes in OLEDs are made out of the same organic (i.e. carbon-based) materials from which many polymers and other plastics are made. Such diodes can be applied to a surface, like glass, in thin layers. To create a working display, thousands of tiny organic diodes are layered against a thin-film transistor, or TFT--a big, integrated chip capable of individually controlling each single diode.
An OLED display thus emits its own light. LCDs require a separate backlight. The image you see on your LCD is created when thousands of transistors open an aperture in a matrix of liquid crystals, allowing the backlight to shine through, like a window blind. That's the reason you have to face an LCD straight on to see it well, and why you can't see it well outside.
Because they're emissive rather than transmissive, OLEDs are sharper and brighter than LCDs. For this same reason, you can clearly see them even if you're peering at them from one side or the other. And that visual superiority isn't their only virtue. OLEDs are also:
Thinner and lighter. With no backlight and fewer layers of glass, OLEDs are little thicker than a dime--about a third the thickness of an LCD.
Better for video. Because OLEDs refresh about 1 million times a second--as much as 1,000 times faster than some LCDs--moving images are much crisper.
Less complex. OLEDs have fewer parts than LCDs. This makes them more rugged and, eventually, should make them easier to manufacture and thus cheaper.
For all these reasons, Kodak's Polgar predicts a vivid future for his OLEDs, with bigger and bigger displays appearing over the next four years. He says we should be seeing 9- to 15-inch OLEDs in laptops and desktops by 2005, and 17-inch OLEDs in TVs by 2006.
He also believes OLEDs are ripe for success because they hold the promise of breaking one of the biggest bottlenecks in computing (the one that keeps us from enjoying images in all their glory): our displays. Ever more powerful processors are capable of generating rich images without breaking a sweat. DSL, cable modems, even 3G wireless networks can easily convey them. But a typical LCD or CRT monitor remains capable of displaying just 787,000 pixels--a fraction of the 6 million pixels of plain old paper.
57-year-old Polgar is an eminently polite and likeable man, with a Ph.D. in physics. But he's also paid handsomely to sell his products. Kimberly Allen, a market researcher with iSuppli/Stanford Resources that follows display technologies, isn't. But she's bullish on OLEDs, too, characterizing them as the "biggest up-and-coming player" among several emanating display technologies. Her firm predicts that the market for OLEDs could reach $2.3 billion by 2008.
HER AFFIRMATION means my own eyes haven't betrayed me. During a demonstration Polgar offered me, the differences between a conventional LCD and one of his OLEDs were, well, plain to see. Even though they were playing the same DVD, a tinier 2-inch OLED display was obviously crisper, brighter, and easier to watch than the bigger 5-inch LCD right beside it.
This smaller-to-bigger side-by-side comparison also suggests another big OLED advantage: Bigger isn't necessarily better. Because the visual detail and viewing angles are so superior on OLEDs, smaller is good enough. A 17-inch OLED TV may give you just as much viewing pleasure as one double the size.
OLED TVs are a long way off, of course. Nevertheless, I'm happy with next spring's baby step--the promise of a digital camera that won't force me out from under a great blue sky into the murky shadows of my car just to get a glimpse of my digital pics.
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