The first organic LED (OLED) was in Sony’s research laboratory in Japan many years ago, before I transitioned from engineering manager to journalist. I was sworn to secrecy (but not with a NDA) and was told, rather gushingly, that this would be the future of television displays. Considering that what I was looking at was only a few millimeters square, I had to accept the intensity of their belief.
Most of us now have an OLED on their person, in the form of the tiny display on the front window of our cell phones. But it is a huge jump to go from there to a watchable color display. I was fortunate to be shown a non-working prototype at NAB in Las Vegas in 2007 and now, after all these years, the TV has become a reality.
On February 29th Sony will
release the XEL-1 OLED television in Canada (it was earlier announced at CES in Las Vegas). The 11-inch screen TV will be priced at an astounding CA$ 2,499.99.
What’s the big deal? Just from its name you should gather that this is no standard LED technology; there’s no SiC in the equation at all, no junction
anything. OLEDs are built with tiny pieces of organic material (the composition of which seems to be a more closely guarded secret by Sony than the formulation for CocaCola) that electrophosphoresces when a voltage is applied across it. The level of the
glow that is produced is proportional to the voltage. The biggest deal here is that we have no backlighting of any kind, the biggest power and technical compromise of both LCDs and DLP displays.
The lack of backlighting also means that the display is incredibly thin, less than 3 mm in places for the XEL-1. And that same lack of backlighting reduces the peak power consumption of the receiver to about 35 W. Add a one million-to-one contrast ratio (it is thousands with an LCD), and a far faster response time – vastly improving fast-moving video – and you have a great video experience! The native resolution of the new receiver is 960 x 450 making it tailored for 1080I or 1080P standards displays – native or converted. Add HDMI, USB and Ethernet inputs and you indeed have the display if the future.
At CES this year (2008), Sony also demonstrated a 27-inch OLED display. Can the biggest boys be far behind? Prices will have to soften, of course, but they always do as output increases and economies of scale take over.
There has to be a downside, right?
In the early days of color television,
red was a big problem. It was the most difficult, most expensive phosphor to obtain for either the camera or the CRT display. With the OLED the problem color is
blue, not because of expense but of life expectancy. Whereas the organic materials to emit red and green are showing lives in excess of 10,000 hours, blue is currently limited to about 5000 hours, maybe a little less. That’s only 208 days running 24/7. But this is also a problem about LCD backlighting that is not being much talked about.
If you watch TV for four hours a day, are you willing to replace your display every 3 years? The answer, rather sadly, is probably yes. But organic doesn’t mean landfill-friendly. Where are we going to satisfy technology demands? If someone comes up with an environmentally-friendly, disposable, 30 inch OLED receiver I have no doubt it would make the cut in the McGoldrick household. Hop to it, Sony!
