I’m looking forward to the next couple of weeks as I’m actually going to manage to avoid any flights, although I am away from home and the office, and will be able to fit in a site visit that I hope will generate an article for our readers. It is on the topic of microLED, which is a very hot one. I must apologise for the delay in getting out the SID report – it’s my fault, entirely – I just took on too much! However, it will be a very good report when it’s done and will include some very good summaries of developments in the market and in a range of different technologies. There are over 80 articles already published on the website and you can see them at this link. http://tinyurl.com/y7l2hkd3
One of the reasons for the SID report not being finished is that I made a quick dash for CineEurope in Barcelona on Wednesday. I probably should not have done, but when I saw it was on, having read Chris’s report on CinemaCon a few weeks ago, I couldn’t resist it. Unfortunately, Barco was not showing its new concept projector and Samsung wasn’t showing its LEDs, so although I saw some very good images, I didn’t get to see the ‘state of the art’. (I also sneaked out of a screening at the end of the day to catch a flight and left my paper notebook on an adjacent seat. At the time of writing, I haven’t been able to track it down, but am still optimistic, as it will be a better report if I have the notes! It is my experience of many years that the quality of the report is proportional to the quality of the notes! Fortunately, I realised that I had left it as I was boarding the plane, so I did a quick ‘brain dump’ into an editor on my electronic notebook, before I lost all the memories!)
After I finish the SID report, I will get the AWE Expo and Infocomm reports and will finally ‘get caught up’.
One of the issues at the moment is that the industry is really at a very interesting stage. Just five or six years ago, when LCD was dominating everything completely, much of the industry was back in research mode. Now those research efforts are coming to fruition in the development phase and there are a wide range of possibilities for the future. However, if microLED really is possible as a way of making sizes above microdisplays, for anything from VR to public and cinema displays, microLED might be a winner. I suspect that competing with LCD TVs, notebooks and monitors on cost may be a real challenge, but if the technology can get there, it’s hard to see anything beating it, except, perhaps, electrically-stimulated QD displays, which should be able to exploit the huge investments in flat panel substrates.
LEDs should solve all the ‘classic’ problems of current displays – viewing angles, response times and efficiency as well as enhancing the dynamic range, brightness and colour gamut. I guess the next challenge will be the development of holographic and 3D displays. Although 3D is unfashionable these days, Bob’s 2nd Law “Everything that increases visual bandwidth wins, in the end” suggests that it will happen eventually. If you throw away depth information, you are losing data and so you are reducing the visual bandwidth. However, it will probably take another three or five years (although as I said a couple of weeks ago, the Dimenco AS3D display at SID was, in every way, an eye opener. An Inflection Point at SID)
Bob
