(Credit:
Fraunhofer Institute)
If you thought there were enough menaces on the road with people yakking away on Bluetooth headsets and texting while driving, these OLED data eyeglasses just upped the ante.
Just imagine if this little invention out of the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems in Germany were to hit mainstream use. We'd have a global epidemic of distracted users plugged into their eyewear, busily accessing the day's news, e-mails, instant messages, and miscellaneous data on their glasses, barely paying attention to where they're going.
Still, there's no halting technology. So looking on the bright side, this interactive eyewear does provide a far more natural alternative to head-mounted displays. The data glasses throw the image onto the retina via an OLED micro-display so it appears a meter in front of the wearer. And instead of getting a static image, an eye-tracking device fitted to the hinge lets you scroll through information by simply moving the eyeball, leaving you essentially hands-free.
Fraunhofer's Dr. Michael Scholles believes the eyeglasses already have ready-made applications in the medical and construction fields, and will open up new uses and, I'm pretty sure, new users like Stephen Hawking and others who are disabled.
(Source: Crave Asia via Gizmag)
The Sony XEL-1 OLED TV is a beautiful display. Its contrast ratio makes pictures pop, it's thinner than a credit card, but with an 11-inch screen, it's too small, and at $2,500, too expensive.
But it's been a year since it was introduced in January 2008, and as of today, it still has no competitors. Where are they?
Though we've been long promised that the era of OLED (organic light-emitting diode) TVs is just around the corner, it appears we're going to have to wait even longer. The major players in electronics who have the resources to build OLED TVs have been whacked by the global financial meltdown along with the rest of us. In other words, the timing to jump-start a brand new TV technology is terrible.
A year later, the XEL-1 OLED TV from Sony is the only commercially available.
(Credit: Sony)"The cost to manufacture them remains high and will remain high until someone's willing to take the risk to develop their own manufacturing capacity on a large scale," explained Paul Gagnon, TV market analyst for DisplaySearch. "Risky investments are not something most of these companies are looking at right now."
Samsung, Sony, LG Electronics, Toshiba, and Panasonic have at various points promised to make OLED TVs. Only one of them, Sony, has done so. But even Sony's is hardly what most people would call a viable option. It's not the standard size of a TV, and isn't exactly priced for a recession. The other firms have only prototypes to show.
Fading hope
There was some hope that Samsung and Sony would be able to release larger OLED TVs this year. But if they were, they'd have brought them to CES in January in order to stir up excitement for them. That didn't happen. Instead, Sony brought the same 11-inch XEL-1 product that's been available for a year, as well as a 21-inch prototype. Samsung brought out a 40-inch prototype.
It's not that OLED is completely impossible to produce. There are a variety of gadgets sporting OLED screens made by these companies, but they're really small: cell phones, GPS devices, and now portable media players.
Small is easy. Making OLED displays big enough for the most attractive applications like laptop screens and televisions is the hard part. There are only a few TV manufacturers with the resources to invest in and build enormous panel factories, among them Samsung, Sony, Sharp, LG, and Panasonic. Panasonic said in September it would hold off on OLED--which basically means it's going to ride the success of its dominance in plasma displays for the time being. Toshiba, which showed a large OLED TV prototype in early 2007, said just a few months later that it would wait to see how popular the sets would be before jumping in head first. (Also, instead of doing it individually, there are a few smaller other makers getting together to push OLED into faster mass production.)
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A Taiwanese display maker just one-upped Sony on the Japanese electronics giant's home turf.
At the FPD International Exhibition in Japan Wednesday, Chi Mei EL, or CMEL, unveiled its OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display that measures less than a millimeter thick and 25 inches diagonal. Sony has a prototype of the same thinness, but it's just 11 inches diagonal.
CMEL's 25-inch OLED panel
(Credit: Digitimes)CMEL's prototype display resolution is WXGA, or 1,366x768 pixels, and shows 16.7 million colors. While it's not yet an actual product, it shows that the race for OLED supremacy is heating up.
Samsung has shown a 12.1-inch OLED prototype, and Toshiba and Panasonic are also working on prototypes for monitors or TVs. In addition, there are several companies that make smaller OLED displays for mobile and handheld devices already, but Sony is the only one with an OLED TV on the market, its 11-inch XEL-1.
The technology is still not ready for mass production, and the price of an OLED TV, using Sony's 11-inch as an example, at $2,500 is still prohibitive for the average consumer.
Sony appeared to be on the verge of starting the next revolution in TV technology last year when it introduced its first OLED television, most notable for its paper-thin screen. The display, which uses bright and low-power organic light-emitting diodes, appeared so promising that the prospects for LCD and plasma TVs were soon called into question.
(Credit:
Sony)
A new study, however, may cast that future in a different light. A research firm called DisplaySearch tested Sony's XEL-1 TV and found that its brightness began to degrade significantly after 1,000 hours--translating to a loss of half its original quality in 17,000 hours, according to the Associated Press. That projection stands in marked contrast to Sony's claim that the display would last 30,000 hours or 10 years of typical use before reaching that degradation level, which is a standard industry measure.
The company reportedly stands by its claims, and DisplaySearch did acknowledge that longstanding longevity problems with OLED displays have been addressed in the latest versions of the technology. Still, the research follows other reports of production issues that have slowed Sony's development of the OLED TV as a mass-market phenom. And given the high cost of making them, which has produced retail prices of $2,500 for an 11-inch screen, they probably won't be a standard living room fixture anytime soon.
Sony XEL-1 EL TV currently sells in Japan for just under $2,000
(Credit: Sony)There's thin. Then there's paper thin. Sony showed an electroluminescent (EL) display that's print-paper thin at the Display2008 conference in Tokyo.
The Sony EL display is based on organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology that uses electroluminescent organic materials. OLED panels are extremely thin because they don't need backlights. The electroluminescent layer contains a polymer substance that directly converts electricity to light.
The panel shown this week at Diplay2008 is about 0.3mm thick, besting Sony's current 1.4mm-thick EL TV (photo). Epson lists its Premium Glossy Photo Paper as 0.3mm thick. So by this standard the panel is literally paper thin.
Sony also exhibited an 11-inch panel.
The most cutting of cutting-edge technology is always a sticker shocker. Sony currently sells an 11-inch EL TV (960×540) for a staggering 190,000 yen, or just under $2,000. That's right, an 11-inch display. Even smaller than the displays on subnotebooks, which typically come with 12-inch LCDs.
The image quality is stunning, however, producing the best--or close to the best--of all of the following: color, contrast, viewing angles, and refresh rates.
"It has a superhigh contrast ratio (allegedly, 1 million to one), it boasts faster response times than LCD or plasma, it looks incredibly sharp with colors that really pop--and because OLED screens don't require a backlight, they're more energy efficient than plasma or LCD," according to this CNET review.
Another thing: the organic matter used can by ruined by the elements, so special sealing technology is necessary for the displays.
Sony has been making smaller, 3.8-inch OLED displays for gadgets since 2004.
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