The Society for Information Display (SID) today announced the winners of its 20th annual Display Industry Awards. The honorees will be recognized during a special luncheon on Wednesday, June 3, as part of Display Week, to be held at the San Jose Convention Center, May 31-June 5.
2015 Recipients Highlight Evolution of OLEDs, Diversity of Display Technology Development
“Each year brings an exciting challenge in terms of choosing the Display Industry Award winners. The nominees serve as a tangible reminder of how much innovation is going on in our industry, and how it’s being brought to product realization,” said SID President Amal Ghosh. “This year’s winners highlight, more than ever, the level of diversity in how displays are being integrated into new product development. They also illustrate, much to the delight of many in the industry, that OLEDs’ time has truly come, as they’re being integrated into more and more commercially viable products.”
To be considered for a 2015 Display Industry Award, a product had to be available for purchase during the 2014 calendar year. The six winners, two in each of three main categories, were chosen by a distinguished panel of experts who evaluated the nominees for their degree of technical innovation and commercial significance, in addition to their potenlctial for positive social impact. The winning products and a brief description of each are listed below. A more comprehensive description of the award winners is included in the Display Week 2015 Show Issue of Information Display magazineor at www.informationdisplay.org.
Display of the Year: Granted to a display product with the most significant technological advances and/or novel or outstanding features.
Gold Award: Samsung’s YOUM Bended Display
The YOUM Bended Display is a flexible AMOLED display that boasts the world’s smallest radius for screen curvature on a mobile device. Features include fine image detail, smooth fonts and one of the industry’s highest color reproduction rates – 97 percent of Adobe RGB(vs. 70 perce3nt for a typical LCD panel). The display is integrated into the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge; it literally curves over onto the edge of the phone, creating new opportunities for display content and format. The 5.59-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600 resolution) display uses a polyimide plastic substrate material to produce a film less than 1mm thick – thinner than any other display currently on the market. Samsung’s flexible AMOLED technology will lend itself well to other emerging applications such as bended, foldable and rollable displays.
Silver Award: LG Display’s 65-inch UHD Curved OLED-TV Panel
LG Display’s 65-inch UHD OLED-TV Panel, the successor to its 55-inch full-HD TV introduced in 2013 (one of the world’s first OLED TVs), is sleek and slim. The panel is only 6mm thick, with a right and left bezel width of 8mm. This 8.3 megapixel display achieves highly rich and natural colors with superior picture quality, and the curved screen’s wider field of view delivers a more theater-like viewing experience. The display employs white OLED with color filter technology, including an oxide-TFT backplane with RGBW architecture, which LG Display believes is the optimal approach for large-sized OLED-TV panels.
Display Component of the Year: Granted for a novel component (sold as a separate part and incorporated into a display) that has significantly enhanced a display’s performance. A component may also include display-enhancing materials and/or parts fabricated with new processes.
Gold Award: Merck KGaA’s new Liquid-Crystal Materials for Ultra-Brightness FFS-LCDs
Fringe-field switching (FFS) is a key technology that enables more refined, ultra-high-resolution LC displays especially for highest pixel density required, e.g., high-end smartphones and tablets. Germany’s Merck KGaA, in cooperation with industry partner LC display (LCD) manufacturers, has developed liquid crystals for the next generation of ultra-high-resolution displays based on FFS technology. Ultra-Brightness FFS (UB-FFS) was brought to market in 2014 for the highest performance smartphones and will be introduced in 2015 for small, medium and IT applications such as tablets and monitors. The innovative energy-saving UB-FFS LC mixture permits up to 15 percent higher light transmittance compared to conventional FFS. In addition to this significant improvement in light efficiency and display power consumption, the high transmission advantage of the new UB-FFS liquid crystals also allows for greater design freedom among product developers.
Silver Award: Intel RealSense Technology
Intel RealSense technology takes creativity and collaboration in a 3D world to a whole new level. It uses a camera, infrared sensing components and software to create a touch-free interface that responds to facial expressions as well as head and hand motions. This new interface, based on real-time depth sensing, enables natural user interactions with content on interactive displays and computers. Users can bring toys, games and books to life using free hand movements to interact with characters and capture faces and objects with 3D scanning technology for sharing, editing and 3D printing. Intel RealSense technology senses distance and movement directly from a device, making it easy to scan virtually anything and save the image as-is or manipulate it into something new.
Display Application of the Year: Granted for a novel and outstanding application of a display, where the display itself is not necessarily a new device.
Gold Award: Apple’s iMac with Retina 5K Display
The 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display features 5120 x 2880 resolution and 14.7 million pixels – 4x more pixels than the standard 27-inch iMac and 67 percent more pixels than a 4K display. As a result, text quality is printed-page sharp, and high-resolution photos can be viewed with pixel-for-pixel detail. A single supercharged Apple-designed timing controller (TCON), with 4x the bandwidth of conventional-panel TCONs, drives all 14.7 million pixels. The Retina 5K display uses an oxide-TFT-based panel to deliver vivid brightness across the entire display, and employs a new photo-alignment process and compensation film to optimize contrast and color vibrancy from any angle. In addition to its 3.5-GHz Intel quad-core i5 processor, the iMac with Retina 5K display features AMD Radeon R9 M290X graphics, delivering up to 3.5 teraflops of computing power – the most powerful graphics ever offered on an iMac.
Silver Award: LG Display’s 1.3-inch Circular Plastic OLED for the G Watch R
LG Display has successfully developed a 1.3-inch full-circle plastic OLED panel for use in its G Watch R. The design incorporates 320 x 320 pixel resolution, a touch sensor, and a barrier film that enables an ultra-thin and lightweight display. The panel also uses new power-saving algorithms that enable an always-on function that provides users with both the sensibility of a conventional analog watch and the convenience of a digital smartwatch. The first-of-its-kind truly circular plastic OLED display will bring a change to the display paradigm by overcoming the limits of conventional displays. The round shape allows more design flexibility in various products compared to conventional square displays, as the innovative design will contribute to display-market development beyond watches to other wearables, including clothing, and also automotive applications.
