14-inch OLED displays through inkjet printing

So Cambridge Display announced back in August that they've developed a technology to "print" an OLED display using fairly traditional inkjet technology, well now they've successfully printed up some 14-inchers with the low-cost manufacturing process, at a 1280 x 768 WXGA+ resolution no less, so it seems as if the age of laptop OLED is almost upon us. Of course, we've been having OLED laptop displays hyped to us for quite a while now, along with their wonderful promise of lower energy consumption, thinner form factor, and of course, lower cost, so there's no telling when these things will actually surface.

[abigsmurf @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Can they give us some estimated prices? Same as TFT? same as CRT? Cheaper than both?

[anon @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

for you investors out there, cambridge (ticker: oled) is at its all time low if you want to get in before the oled hype goes mainstream

[abigsmurf @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Have they patented the manufacturing method? I've been burnt by investing in British tech firms before.

*Shoots Jez-San for running Argonaut into the ground and then stripping it of it's valuable assets*

[Jake @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Screw OLED laptops, I want my optimus keyboard!

[utodrag @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Sorry guy's i do not want to spoil the party, but the OLED tech is far from ready. The problem is that some of the colors loose the clarity within the year. So this is not realy sellable. This is also the reason why we can buy 2 colored mp3 players, cause those are the 2 colors (blue and yellow) which won't loose brighness.

[Beckman @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

#5 -- I don't know that is right. What I read was that Red and Green are solved, but Blue was the problem (until recently). From Wikipedia under "Disadvantages": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED

"The biggest technical problem left to overcome has been the limited lifetime of the devices. Red and green OLED elements already had lifetimes of well over 20,000 hours but blue OLED lifetimes had lagged significantly behind. However, in May 2005, Cambridge Display Technology announced a blue OLED with a lifetime of over 100,000 hours."

[delerious @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Wow....they have limited lifetimes.....I wouldn't trust it in a laptop unless I could get my laptop replaced every two years for $100 dollars or so. Sounds like putting an ultra-low heat/thinner plasma on one, I would trust that.

I'll wait for like...two years when the technology is better developed, but by then LCD's will be much, much, much cheaper.

[ike @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

the problem is the Blue OLED, it is still having problems.
20,000 hours is more than enough time to run. your crt television is rated for 15,000 hours.
think about it. 20,000 hours is 2.2 years ON FOR 24 HOURS. no one has their screen on for 24 hours/365 days. even if your screen is on for 12 hours a day, thats 4.4 YEARS before it burns out.
seeing as how your laptop will be outdated in a year anyway, the lifetime of these things is not an issue.
in my humble opinion.

[Just a person @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

#6 first of all, wikipedia is user-editable. that means that ANYBODY can change what it says - I can go in there *right now* and change that "blue" to "yellow" - so I wouldn't put too much stock in that. Second of all, I'm going to take #5's side in this, blue/yellow OLED screens have been the norm for mp3 players for quite a while now.

Also, May 2005 was 7 months ago, that's not recently in the world of technology.

[Bible and Apologetics Teacher @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

I wonder what the "20,000 hours" rating actually means. If it means something like "guaranteed for 99% of all devices" or "all devices below one standard deviation of the center", you'd still have a significant number of failed pixels within two years. 1024 x 768 gives 786,432 pixels, each of which is liable to failure.

[Dimplemonkey @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

No, the problems of the blue pixels in an OLED display have been taken care of several months ago.

http://news.designtechnica.com/article7745.html

[college student @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

cant wait to buy there once they come out that is

[steve @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

This should help clear some questions up with OLED...

Here's a pretty good prediction of OLED's future outlook:

- Stage 1 - 2004 - 2006
-- Limited volume production
-- Acceptable performance in some products
-- Relatively high manufacturing costs

- Stage 2 - 2007 - 2009
-- Performance competitive with LCD
-- Cost competitive with LCD

- Stage 3 - 2010 +
-- Performance exceeding LCD
-- Cost lower than LCD

The Green and Red colors allready surpass the lifetime goal by far, but the blue has lagged behind, but it has improved dramatically over the past couple of years.

On May 25th 2004 CDT announced a lifetime of blue at 30,000 hours starting at 100 nits.

On Oct. 12th 2004 CDT announced a lifetime of blue at 70,000 hours starting at 100 nits.

On May 23rd 2005 CDT announced a lifetime of blue at 100,000 hours starting at 100 nits, or 25,000 hours at 200 nits, or 10,000 hours at 300 nits, or 6,000 hours at 400 nits.

Lifetimes and efficiency (better electric energy conversion, I.E. a few years ago only like 50% of the electricty converted into light energy in an OLED, now they have increased that to around 80-100%) and manufacturing procedures are getting better every year by a lot!

NOTE: Nits refers to screen brightness (AKA cd/m�). 70-150 nits are used in most handhelds, except mobile phones usually support up to 350 nits to see in the bright sun. 150-300 nits are used in most PC monitors or laptop screens, and 300-500 nits are used for televisions or large screen TVs. Lifetime requrements: mobile phones/mp3 players (and most handhelds)=4,000 hours. Handheld Gameboy type products=8,000 hours, computer monitors/laptop monitors/small to medium sized TVs=10,000 hours. Large screen TV's=10,000-15,000 hours. Also note that lifetime refers to when the screen reaches half of its original brightness.

For comparison, at about 350 nits, current LCDs lasts around 50,000 hours, CRT 15,000 hours, Plasma 10,000 hours, OLED 8,000 hours (blue is the only limitation, but is improving every year by an average of 1,500 hours @350 nits).

[Luke @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Well, lets think on this. It's a printable screen, so it can't cost that much. If it wears out in a year, it's easily replaceable and won't do too much damage to your wallet.

[TheBlunderbuss @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Imagine how thin an OLED tablet PC could be... that is if the screen were a separate component and the CPU would be in a bag.
Still that'd be neat.