Along with affordable
solid state drives, OLED panels are among the most
universally desired bits of tech today. It's therefore a good idea to prick up our ears and listen when new California startup Kateeva promises to make OLEDs bigger and cheaper with its large-area printing technology. Advised by our old friend
Vladimir Bulovic of MIT, the company has gone official with word of its prototype OLED printer, which can produce displays on a scale of 1.8 by 1.5 meters (about six by five feet) at a cost roughly equal to 60 percent of the manufacturing costs of current LCD technology. We say
can, what we really mean is that it has shown itself capable of achieving those numbers -- it's still in the prototype stage and won't be sent out to display manufacturers for testing until next year but it's something to look forward to, nonetheless. We advise checking out the
Technology Review article for all the gory production details along with a neat video interview with Kateeva co-founder Conor Madigan.
posted February 11th 2010 3:02PM
HOly F yess!! That is what I want in my dream home theater set up. Absolutely gorgeous wall to wall display.
Let me tell you how this is going to go down.
Step #1: Company A makes pie in the sky claim about an insane breakthrough in tech.
Step #2: Investors pour money into the company and the CEO buys Ferrari Enzo.
Step #3: Company never delivers on promise and CEO crashes aforementioned Ferrari Enzo creating an expensive $1million metaphor for the state of Company A.
@formetopoopon
Why does that sound familiar?
@formetopoopon If it's one step closer to spray-on-TV then he can crash as many Ferrari Enzos as he pleases.
"it's still in the prototype stage and won't be sent out to display manufacturers for testing until next year"
Not a mention or example of a functional display made by even the unit in "testing" right now. A little premature to break out the champagne don't you think?
"idea to prick up our ears" ... pick maybe?;)
@GefEenz
The correct word is prick.
@NickA
Yeah prick is right. Although the sentence evokes a horribly pornographic image it is still grammatically correct...
F*%k her in the ear. BLOW HER BRAINS OUT. YEAH. I'm the Juggernaut BITCH.
Sorry I could not help myself.
@Deadly SideFX
There is an old British movie titled "Prick up your Ears." It is a double entendre, where "ears" doesn't refer to the ears on the side of your head. The British would understand.
@displaysRus
Thanks for that laugh. It took a second for me get what you were getting at but I laughed real good for quite some time. So what was the movie about? I'm guessing it dealt with homosexuals in some way.
Printing oled screens has been in the news for atleast half a decade now. I guess we should thank corporatism for milking lcd and plasma as much as possible instead of spending those million dollar bonuses on research and development.
Startups are often promising, but they are often undercapitalized as well.
So what happens? Money starved startup gets an offer from a huge industry leader
They take it
Huge industry leader quietly buries method for producing much cheaper OLED panels and continues to manufacture their high-priced ones
Massive profit.
The savings in manufacturing costs won't be passed on to the consumer any time soon. Look at how inflated the prices of LED-backlit TVs have been. They're starting to become a bit more reasonable now that aggressive companies like Vizio are stepping in, but for a while they were getting away with quite a premium that wasn't necessarily a reflection of manufacturing costs.
@NickA
Yeah sometimes that whole supply and demand thing can really screw the consumer. Though I think they would not do that quite as much if the stock exchange did not have such lofty goals you had to meet to stay a publicly traded company. I think you have to make like over $10 million in profit every three year or something like that to stay listed.
Any real economist who wants to correct that feel free to do so.
@NickA
It's a basic issue of supply and demand. Everyone is hyping up these LED TVs, and they're all rushing out to buy them. It's in high demand, so the prices will reflect that.
Give it a couple of years while OLED gets bigger and cheaper, and more people stay happy with the TVs they already have. Those LED LCD TVs will get cheaper then.
OLED is always "next year".
so are cheap SSD's...
I'm fine with that as long as it works just as well and doesn't harm us physically in any way ... I don't want to hear later on that they are using some sort of weird chemical that causes cancer or something in order to print these screens out.
Soda Industry Exec: "We are going to stop using sugar for our drinks and start using High Fructose Corn Syrup."
Employee: "Why, sir?"
Soda Industry Exec: "Because it will be cheaper that way."
@Meekermoloko Haven't you heard? Oxygen causes cancer.
@Adeptus
And it starts fire. Go ahead! I dare you to start a fire withOUT oxygen.
@Adeptus
Oxygen Channel causes cancer to men's brains.
@Gas
Drink some firewater and hold your breath.
how much does the panel cost in a 50" set? percentage of the entire unit? though not the same, on smartphones the screen is around 30% to 40% of the handset bom. Is it the same for tvs?
DuPont Displays has been working on ink jetting OLEDs for the past 7 years. They have made nice looking ~5" demos in the past, but it is a lot harder than you would think. Have not heard anything from them for a couple of years. Rumor has it that DuPont wants to sell that division.
Look, DuPont makes ink for printers... all kinds. They know printing. If DuPont can't make it viable, I would be skeptical of any new fangled start up claims.
@displaysRus
Your skepticism is warranted, but this startup looks like it grew out of a Masters/Doctoral thesis, which may mean they found something out that DuPont didn't or may have missed. Unlikely considering the amount of research and money DuPont can back their departments with, not to mention their printing experience. However industry will only pursue something for as long as they think it is cost effective. Someone in a lab a university will crank on their research till it's done because they want to friggin graduate. So there is a chance that this might be the real deal.
Hey a bipedal organism can hope right?
@Deadly SideFX
I can trump your Master/Doctoral thesis with a Nobel Prize.
DuPont got in to OLEDs when they purchased Uniax, a start up founded by Alan Heeger, professor at UCSB who won a Nobel prize for work with conductive polymers - which is fundamental to making polymer OLEDs work and led to the founding of Uniax. This was over 10 years ago.
Kateeva's approach seems to be a hybrid between vacuum vapor deposition and ink jetting. It remains to be seen if there is a real advantage here or if it is typical R&D hype. All I'm really saying is that based on DuPont's example, taking very plausible sounding university research into real world manufacturing is a whole lot harder than people realize.
@displaysRus
Very true, thanks for the info on that. We have a cleanroom facility that does micro and nano scale fabrication along with our synchrotron facility (2nd gen) so I'm familiar with the difficulty in trying to industrialize anything that involves vapor deposition. I've been to a few conferences with people who have done some amazing work with ink jetting in the Lab-on-a-chip stuff but this is of a different scale so it remains to be seen how well this turns out. I wish them luck because I sure a hell would love a cheap 50" OLED for the bedroom.
Hell I'd put one in the bathroom too just for shits and giggles...
Prick Up Your Ears... Still laughing dude.
I want one for my house.
I can't wait for the world to go to the complete 3D age where 3d printers are everywhere , and pirate blueprints everywhere. that would be awesome like "HEY THE NEW NEXUS TWELVE IS OUT" oh rly ? printing now...
Kateeva sounds exactly like cattiva, which in Italian means bad/naughty girl.