We hit a new record report size this week with our SID report. (If you normally get it as an attachment but didn’t this week, it may have hit an email limit, but you can download it from www.displaydaily.com). Thanks to all of the team for their contributions. Amazingly, as soon as it was finished, we started to see other stories that perhaps could have gone into it. We’ll catch up with those.
Now, we’ll get onto our reports from AWE Expo, Infocomm and CineEurope. That will take another couple of weeks – thanks for your patience! Fortunately, there will be fewer events over the next few weeks as much of the world goes on vacation. We will have a report from Siggraph, this year and then we’ll be on to IFA and IBC and event overload, again.
We have a smaller than usual issue this week, but after the SID report, I doubt that I’ll get many complaints!
There is no doubt about the “topic du jour” at the moment. Our Display Daily writers basically choose their own topics – they are all industry specialists that have deep knowledge of the business and this week we managed to get three different columns on miniLED and microLED. Fortunately, they were all different, but it shows that the topic is occupying the thoughts of our writers at the moment. There’s a saying, apparently from China, that “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their correct name” (it’s one of the reasons that I get so irritated by Samsung’s hijacking of industry terms to bend them to their marketing agenda).
I’m picky about this kind of terminology – we try very hard to always accurately differentiate between UltraHD (3840 x 2160) and the DCI 4K container which is 4096 x 2160 but that hasn’t been helped by the CEA talking about UltraHD as 4K.
So, I’m looking for good phrases to differentiate microLEDs that are basically built using semiconductor processes and used in arrays. I would call these microLED microdisplays and that seems like a reasonable term. However, the other kind of microLED display is the type that is made by singulating (to use a word I hadn’t seen until relatively recently) an LED wafer and distributing the LEDs across a much wider area. Ken called them ‘sparse matrix microLEDs’ in his report from SID and I like that description, but its not very snappy! We could call them distributed microLEDs.
For the moment, we’re also going to try to be reasonably strict about using the term microLED to mean LEDs that are less than 100 microns on at least one side. That’s different from the usage that Samsung has, but seems to be in line with the usage in other areas. Small LEDs above that we’ll call miniLEDs. As Matt said when we discussed this in an email exchange, pretty soon we’ll have picoLEDs and nanoLEDs, no doubt!
So, if you have a suggestion for a term or two that we can use for these two kind of microLEDs. Please send suggestions to me!
Bob
