Right now LG's
15-inch OLED TV is the cheapest you can get -- but at about $2,500 it won't be rocking too many peoples' lives. We've heard promises of dropping costs thanks to
printed displays for ages now, but never on a scale like this.
DuPont has teamed up with Dainippon Screen to create a printing technique capable of line-feeding a 50-inch display in just two minutes. Two minutes! The printer is likened to a high precision garden hose, flying over the display surface at a speed of five meters per second depositing that good, good OLED juice in just the right places with nary a drip or an unwanted sprinkle. DuPont Displays President William Feehery says the technique "is worth scaling up" and could compete on cost with LCDs while delivering a 15-year lifespan. That's not quite the 100 years they
promised us last time, but we'll take it. No word on when, or if, this technique will actually be deployed en masse.
posted May 17th 2010 1:28PM
File under "never going to see it happen"
@FNG
file under oprah has one
@DooMskis
File under "she can afford one"
I'm talking about this being real so we common folk can buy a 50" OLED for a grand.
@FNG
Yup, another OLED wet dream.
@DoctarPeppar
I'm sure the ink will dry eventually. Let's be optimistic here.
@FNG
Making a big ass TV screen with a garden hose. Now that's what I would call MAGICAL !!
@FNG
File under:
Saudi Arabian guys are going to buy that company
@FNG
When engadget has nothing substantial to post, they look to their repertoire of future-technology stories. I'm surprised this one wasn't about college students...
@FNG
I don't doubt that they will be able to print the light-emitting layer very quickly in the distant future, but what do they print it onto?
If you think the answer is a sheet of ordinary plastic, you get a big fat zero out of ten.
If your answer was "a more complicated and expensive piece of TFT substrate than even the best-in-class LCDs require, which takes hours, not minutes, to make and is the most expensive part of a display" then you win.
You still need to manufacture the transistors that control each pixel (and all the sub-features of those), all the other components of the pixel, the mesh of wires to address each pixel, all the layers of insulators between everything, the row drivers, the column drivers, the voltage regulators and the timing controllers.
Except you don't print it, you need to manufacture a single sheet of silicon the size of a large number of displays, which has all of those features to make the transistor work and duplicated across millions of pixels.... All of which must happen through fine-scale lithographic processes onto a laser-annealed polysilicon substrate, with all the relevant dopings and chemical depositions. And you need to do that without any flaws or you will end up with dead/stuck pixels, which nobody likes.
And the transistors in those pixels need to switch a higher current than in LCDs (as each pixel emits light, instead of being a shutter) so must be bigger. And each line that delivers current to each row or column must be MUCH bigger.
Doesn't sound so simple or such a cost saving now, does it?
Net result: yes... the surface is potentially marginally less expensive than the cheap color filter that goes onto most LCDs (but may not be needed in the future)
BUT the substrate is always more expensive than for LCDs as it will always require more advanced technology which fewer companies can manufacture.
Printing the OLED bit is not the whole picture.
But since this is marketing coming from a company that's trying to hype their expensive technologies, I guess that shouldn't surprise anybody :)
Downrank me if you want to shoot the messenger.
@ckrames1234
Not every article has to be about something that everybody can see and buy and get bored with next week. I like future technology stories.
No video? Oh we get an iPad take apart but no 50" TV printout.
1k$ for 50 inches would be awesome, 15 years is totally fine lifetime for a TV cause I believe a decent chunk of the population(among middle class i.e.) can afford to move to a new TV in that time phaze. How far is this thing from market though?
So, it's like my HP printer?
Take that, general knowledge that printers haven't evolved in 10 years..
@Johanu
No, printing OLED screens is cheaper than printing with a HP inkjet.
@Johanu
Yes, 2 minutes to print a screen in HighDef, 30 seconds to print a screen in Draft quality.
@Johanu
"OLED LOAD LETTER? WTF does that mean?"
OLED TV's invading stores in 3, 2, 1...
@Aguilera More like 868,678,342,235,743,986,278,763... 868,678,342,235,743,986,278,762... 868,678,342,235,743,986,278,761
@engadgetcomexcludeengadget
I think you mean...
68,678,342,235,743,986,278,760 fs = 2.178 yrs,
Which wouldn't be so bad as opposed to...
868,678,342,235,743,986,278,760 fs = 27.546 yrs
I don't know. This sounds promising and not as blue sky as a lot of other stories like this. Plus du pont is a company with enough clout to pull it off
People have been spraying their screens will watching videos for years
@joelaf
oops, will =while
I want this for wallpaper! :)
How does this even work? They just print the screen?
@Jurrens The OLED materials are put into solution and then printed on top of an active matrix tft array. The active matrix backplane would still need to be made similarly to that used in an LCD.
Can't believe no one has ever though to hit the "print screen" button before.
*System Required
@DTJ
That was awesome. Now to sit back and enjoy this TAB.
@CtrlBurn
It's actually 'System Request'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Request
@Hazman Heh, I always thought it was a weird thing to put on a keyboard. Somehow it never occurred to me that it might be for something else.
So it wont last as long, is cheaper to make, and will cost the same as, or more than a similar LCD TV.
Cant help but feel as though I'm getting bent over and savagely raped in the ass, with no lube.
@A25i OLED has intrinsic advantage over (screening light techniques employed in your lube filled nose cramming LCD tech) FYI... and 15 years is not exactly something to scoff at unless you are R-Kelly....
I think the idea is that it will be thinner, lighter, and maybe look better as well. For those things, some people are willing to part with more cash.
Good, although LED LCD's are basking in the lime light at the moment, I cant wait for the Saturation, Contrast Smashing, Pure Color OLED's to drop some serious smack down. Oh and for people who were complaining about the cost estimates (the same as LCD)--- early adopters always pay more, and new technology always costs more then the old news from last quarters- to stop your "I can see Russia from my back yard while I hunt animals from a helicopter" babble and start embracing the future by accepting that better screen technology means a better viewing experience, something people are obviously willing to drop $ on considering the explosive adoption rate that 720 and 1080P had over 480....
til we see 85-100 inch oled sets for the price of a dlp tv, oled fails price wise. in theory the oled set should be cheaper than a dlp tv, so we should be able to get a 100 inch for like 2,000 but that would wait afew years or a decade til they are mass produced.
Meh... we've been hearing these promises about OLED for many years now and nothing but tiny expensive screens to show for it. And some manufacturers have even dropped their work on OLED. Maybe DuPont can rejuvenate things, but I won't be holding my breath waiting on these to hit the market. OLED has been nothing but hype this far.
Sooo....I am completely lost on this. What in the world is this product??