What They Say
Sony announced its new Crystal LED display and we reported on it. Sony Upgrades (and Downgrades) its Crystal LED.
A correspondent pointed out that I had left in the Sony table in this article, a reference to microLED. Several years ago, I did accept, when the display was announced in 2016, Sony’s definition, but that was before a lot of discussion on the microLED vs miniLED vs LED definition argument.
These days I would tend to put microLED as sub 100 micron per edge. Now, I don’t think Sony ever said its chip dimensions, but given it was claiming 1% of the surface was LED and pitch was 1.2mm, if we assume the chip was square it would be 120 microns per side. On the other hand, I assumed that the RGB elements were side by side, so something like 40 x 120 microns. So, that would fit a definition that put the average side length below 100 microns.
However, after I wrote about definitions in 2018, someone pointed out to me that a better definition of a microLED is one that is made from the epi layers alone (excluding monolithic microdisplays). I was convinced by that, so these days, I would define the Sony CLED as miniLED. I’m open to discussion on it, though!
What We Think
I’m fond of quoting the Confucian proverb ‘The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names’. The accurate use of terms and words are very important in business. Allow me a Friday detour. Many (many) years ago, I was in the steel tube business and quoted a company for tonnes (truck loads!) of tubes ‘cut exact to BS1775’ (which was the specification of the tube, if I remember correctly). Now, BS1775 specified that ‘exact’ meant +6.3mm – 0 . However, the buyer took it as meaning exact in the general sense of the word. I probably got the order because my quote was cheaper than the others, but in the end, the buyer had to pay to have the tubes he had bought re-cut to the very tight tolerance he needed.
That kind of experience is why I get very irritated with companies that try to hijack technical terms for marketing purposes and support the huge amount of work that goes into defining and refining standards such as the IDMS. (BR)
