Micro LEDs are reckoned to be a potentially very disruptive technology, for both large and small screens (“The Only Disruptive Technology at Display Week”). Since SID 2015, more and more stories have been appearing about these products, especially at shows like ISE. Post-SID ’15, it was thought that the first micro-LED display would come from Apple, following its acquisition of LuxVue in 2014. Sony, however, has beaten them to the punch.
Set to be shown at Infocomm 2016 (stand C7708), Sony has announced a new display technology called ‘CLEDIS’, standing for Crystal LED Integrated Structure. It builds on Sony’s work on a micro-LED (Crystal LED) TV, seen as a prototype at CES 2012 (Display Monitor Vol 19 No 3), and is described as a large-scale canvas solution using ultrafine RGB LEDs (approximately 0.003m²) as the light source.
Each pixel uses one red, one green and one blue LED. Because they are inorganic, blue lifetime is longer than OLED, but black levels are comparable (more than 99% of the surface area is black, Sony says). Viewing angles are ‘almost 180°’ and brightness can reach 1,000 cd/m². Colour depth is 10-bit and colour gamut coverage reaches 140% of sRGB. Sony also says that its own pixel drive circuitry enables frame rates up to 120fps.
Each CLEDIS tile is 403 x 435mm, with 320 x 360 LEDs. The display controller (440 x 349 x 65mm) features DisplayPort (x2) and DVI-D (x4) interfaces. Up to 72 tiles can be controlled by one controller, and up to 20 controllers can be used together. This means that as many as 1,440 tiles can be used in a single display. To put this in context, an 8k display would only use 144 units (9.7 x 2.7m).
Sony will show the CLEDIS product at Infocomm and plans to release it in Europe in Q1’17.
