Sony to pump ¥22bn into OLED production

Sony will spend ¥22bn (£105m/€140m/$205m) on OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) panel production, part of its attempt to position the ultra-thin display technology as the successor to LCD. Sony XEL-1 OLED TV Sony's XEL-1 OLED TV: small screen, big price Sony plans to spread the cash across “middle and large size OLED …

[Alan Jenney]

Do you think they might use OLED with computers?

All this talk of OLED panels being used in television and media players, but given the 40% saving in power consumption, the thin and light construction and the excellent contrast, is there not a case for them to be used in laptops and monitors? Or am I missing something here?

[Anonymous John]

Re Do you think they might use OLED with computers?

Eventually, I expect. Far too expensive at present. It's hard to see them selling many OLED TVs at the present price.

[Ralph B]

Lifespan?

The biggest argument against OLED is surely the limited lifespan - The Reg's own technology review said:

> The organic compounds degrade with use, especially those

> that emit blue light, so they won't operate at full brightness for

> anywhere near as long as an LCD will. The addition of

> phosphorescent materials do improve OLED longevity, but still

> not up to LCD levels.

But perhaps that is an argument FOR the technology in Sony's eyes.

[Tim Spence]

RE: Do you think they might use OLED with computers?

Absolutely, but they're already able to produce 11" screens (albeit very expensively), so they could do this now if the price was right.

I guess the current push is to produce the screens large enough to use in the more lucrative home-telly market, and prices for mobile phone and laptop-sized screens will naturally reduce.

[Register Reader]

Missing something

Yep, you are probably missing the fact that you can use TVs as monitors.. they're basically just the same thing, but TVs have decoders and usually speakers too..

[bart]

cost

We're talking about products that are in development. One of the big promises of OLED technology is low cost of production; potentially an order of magnitude less than current technologies.

[Andrew Steer]

Doubt OLED useful for computers just yet

With the present technology the power-saving comes from the fact that the power scales with the total light emitted by the screen. Since TV content contains the full range of colours (and films tend to be rather darker, closer to 20% "load" on average) you save power compared to an LCD which burns the backlight regardless of content.

In a typical PC application with mostly full-white backgrounds you'll probably use slightly more power than an LCD (present generation technology), similarly aging will be a bigger issue with higher average brightness (and the fact that the high brightness will make it run hotter, further accelerating the aging), and significant static image-content will be a burn-in problem (eg Windows' taskbar).

I'd be very surprised to see PC OLED screens any time soon.

[John]

@Andrew Steer

real coders use black backgrounds!