Friday, March 21, 2008

Why Toshiba Dropped OLED TV

Investigation by engineers of the Sony 11” OLED offering has revealed that power is still a major issue and could well affect the roll-out of any future OLED screened as governments world-wide move to bring in rating systems for all TV technology including Plasma, LCD, DLP and OLED. Full article here: Smarthouse

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Digital Journal TV First Look: Organic LED and the Future of Television



In this episode Digital Journal TV will give you a first look at Sony's 11-inch XEL-1 and discuss the pros and cons of this emerging TV technology. There is a long list of benefits but we've also found a few setbacks, and we look into just how much Sony plans to invest in the future of television. Source: Digital Journal

Analysis of Sony's OLED TV Reveals Design Innovations

The XEL-1 organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TV released by Sony Corp of Japan in December 2007 has a display only 3mm thick. In addition to its innovative design, another key selling point is the display performance. We measured and evaluated the display performance with the help of a panel engineer, and came to understand the difficulties that Sony faced in overcoming the drawbacks associated with using OLED panels in TVs, and how it made the best use of the superlative image quality that OLED panels offer.

Extending Service Life
The most intriguing of the difficulties Sony faced was brightness time control. It turns out that after the TV is turned on, the brightness is automatically adjusted through five levels in only 300s (Fig 1). This appears to be a clever way of utilizing still-developing OLED panels.



Full article here: Nikkei Electronics Asia

Monday, March 3, 2008

Hitachi to launch slimline Wooo TV (range only 38mm wide)

Following on from Sony’s launch of the 8mm thick XEL-1 OLED TV in Japan, Hitachi has thrown down the gauntlet in Europe by announcing the imminent arrival of its so-called Wooo range of slimline TVs.

Well, Hitachi isn’t actually going to describe any of the models in its new range specifically as a TV, as none of them feature an on-board TV tuner. Quite what it will call them isn’t yet clear. However, with a suitable set-top box and an HDMI cable, they are all perfectly able to function as TVs.

Space saving mission

The omission of a tuner is just one of many space-saving and size-reducing measures taken by Hitachi. The on-board power supply has been downsized by 33 per cent too, a move that allows for a much thinner screen overall. Full article here: Techradar

OLEDs: Past, present and future

First appearing in 1999, the OLED display was expected to be the wunderkind of the flat-panel display world, the LCD killer that would quickly take over across a range of applications. Pundits cautioned, however, that it might take OLED technology until 2002 or even 2003 to scale up to 10 inches.

Flash forward nine years to 2008, and only one 10-inch-plus OLED has made it to production—and that only in relatively small quantities, with the manufacturer reportedly losing money on every one. Otherwise, the OLED has yet to progress beyond a few small-screen applications. What happened? And now that Sony Corp. has started testing the market with an 11-inch OLED TV, what's next?

Two reasons are most often cited for the OLED's failure to meet expectations. The first is that the LCD, ever a moving target, continued its relentless drive to better performance for lower cost, and passive OLEDs became less attractive. The second is that active-matrix OLEDs (AMOLEDs) present manufacturing challenges in the active-matrix circuitry, in the display materials and structures, and in the interaction between the circuitry and display. Given the advances in active-matrix LCDs, the investment required to iron out the wrinkles in AMOLEDs and achieve reasonable manufacturing yield just didn't seem worth it. Full article here: EE Times