OledPrinting
Latest
Delawareans rejoice as DuPont builds OLED TV testing plant in Newark
The State of Delaware has bust out a grant of $920,000 for DuPont's obsessed project to bring OLED TVs to the masses. It's building a facility at the Stine-Haskell Research Center in Newark with the chemicals-giant stumping $30 million out of its own back pocket. The new unit will employ 35 people to investigate the possibility of producing Organic Light Emitting Diodes for use in televisions for a fraction of the current cost. In comparison, the OLED TVs we saw at CES could retail for as much as $10,000, enough to make sure you don't ask Grandma for one next Christmas. The line will be used to test the "spray printing" methods that can print a 50-inch TV in under two minutes we saw in 2010. DuPont's obliged to keep the facility open for five years, or it'll expect angry civil servants to storm the building looking for a million dollars worth of stationery in return.
Samsung 'prints' 19-inch OLED TV, teases our display daydreams yet again
Considering Seiko Epson was touting its inkjet OLED technology over a year ago and researchers have supposedly been developing OLEDs as cheap as newspapers for some time now, at this point we're really more interested in seeing electronics manufacturers do more walking and less talking. Thankfully Samsung has acknowledged our tech impatience by sharing a prototype 19-inch OLED that's capable of displaying 58ppi -- or about a quarter of full HD's resolution -- and 16.77 million colors with a limited 8-bit color scale at a brightness of 200 nits. No, it may not look or sound as sexy as the 0.5mm thick flapping panel or 40-inch 1080p OLED sets Samsung shared back in 2008, but unlike those dinosaurs, this latest prototype was made via the old OLED "inkjet method." Sadly the Korean tech giant dashed our hopes of heading over to Kinkos anytime we needed a fresh OLED big screen by stating "the technology is still under development." Now if we had a nickel for every time we've heard that before, we'd probably be staring at an OLED printer on our desk right now.
Kateeva wants to print OLED displays, says they'll be cheaper that way
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.
