This week is a bit shorter than some of our issues as we are beavering away to produce our SID report. We still have a lot to do, so it will be early next week before it all gets finished. We are publishing as we go along on the website if you are keen to check on a topic before we’re finished. The website has quite a carefully created tagging system, so you can see all the articles related to the SID 2017 event by going to the front of the website and looking at the menu at the bottom of the page, in the second column. You can also see menu items at the bottom of the Large Display Monitor or Mobile Display Monitor pages.
This is a frantic time of the year for news as SID, Computex, AWE Expo, Infocomm and Anga.com all take place within just a few weeks. We have already sent substantial reports from 11 events this year and we have plenty more planned!
What is amazing is the sheer range of display technologies that are currently engendering excitement with different groups of developers. There is a huge amount going on in near to eye displays for augmented, mixed and virtual reality. MicroLED, OLEDs, DLP and LCOS technologies are all being intensively developed in that area.
There are great steps coming soon with flexible displays, mainly OLED; at the SID Business Conference “flexible and rollable” was something of a mantra, although in this area, only OLED is currently a real option. However, as we have reported, flexible LCDs can be made and that might be an opportunity in another big development area of automotive displays, where AMOLEDs are struggling to meet the qualification requirements*. Auto applications are multiplying all the time.
Notebooks and monitors would be more exciting if anybody could make enough good OLEDs for those applications – at SID we heard unconfirmed rumours that some brands are getting as few as 20% or less of the OLEDs that they would like for notebook applications. If there were good OLEDs available for monitors, then certainly there would be a lot of desire for the fantastic visual quality that’s possible, again, subject to meeting the lifetime requirements. As I’ve repored before, there is more innovation in desktop monitors than there has ever been, even though volumes are not growing.
Moving up to TV, OLED adoption is widening out – we report this week that Loewe now has four ranges of OLED TVs and there is still talk of getting to inkjet printing of OLEDs for TVs, which could transform the costs of OLED TV making. OLED will have to up its game to compete with QD-based LCDs as Ken pointed out in his recent Display Daily. (This is War!)
At SID, Nanosys was privately showing a very good looking “QD in the filter” sample intended for use in an LCD. We haven’t talked about it much so far, but one of the secondary benefits of moving the QDs from the backlight to the front of the LCD is that you now have an emissive layer (on red and green, at least) on the front of the display, so viewing angle colour problems ought to be completely eliminated. Given that there were some very fast and clean LCDs being shown at SID, with no obvious motion artefacts, the next year or two could see LCDs that no longer have to be marked down for speed or viewing angle. That’s a big deal after years of ‘issues’.
BOE was even showing a sample of an inkjet-printed electro-emissive QD technology and Nanosys talked about a huge boost in the efficiency of emissive blue QDs, so there are still significant step changes in technology to come!
As you go beyond TV to digital signage, there are breakthroughs in small pitch LED because of the development of Chip on Board technology, although costs are still pretty high. AT SID JDI (I just typed ‘Toshiba’ – old habits die hard!) showed a transparent display that is claimed to have 80% transmission by eliminating the colour filter – Sharp showed something similar at ISE earlier this year.
Projection is going through a lot of change because of the switch to solid state light sources. Laser phosphor is developing well and new solutions for the ‘challenge of green’ are allowing a boost in LED projectors.
Moving up to cinema, Samsung sent a shock wave through the display world with its demonstrations at Cinemacon of a cinema screen based on LEDs (Samsung Rocks CinemaCon with New LED Screen for Theatres). We’re early in this, but at Infocomm in 2015 I talked to LED suppliers who had been asked to make quotations for this application. I have spoken to LED specialists who think that the colour and grey scale performance may not be good enough to use LEDs, but I’ve also had a ‘heads up’ that someone will be showing a new driving scheme at Infocomm that will improve the image quality of LEDs.
Really, this must be the most technically interesting time, ever, to be in the display business. I suspect this is partly because of the amount of money that is being invested in the industry, which in general is currently making money, but it’s also related to the number of engineers working on displays – probably more than ever in the past as China starts to move to its position in a few years of becoming the largest maker of displays.
Bob
* If you have heard that any OLEDs have been qualified, I’d love to know – email [email protected]
