LG debuts thin malleable screens made from contact lens material LG Display has shown off a thin, lightweight, stretchable and twistable micro-LED screen – an innovation South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) hopes will boost the nation's electronics industry. The display subsidiary of Korea's sprawling LG Corporation said the full color RGB, 100ppi resolution screen …
Inorganic LEDs aren't just more efficient than OLED. They can run efficiently at retina-searing brightness for tens of thousands of hours. UV-A chips can incinerate pretty much anything at close range except optical silicone.
It looks like LG figured out how make micro-LEDs, mount them, and prevent thermal stress all in one demo.
Maybe if people stopped buying the bloody things by the truckload they might be arsed to change them.
Unfortunately, as long as how well they sell is governed by how gushing the tech reviews are over the panel, the UI isn't on their radar of things to worry about.
HINT: A decent panel on a top notch system beats teh wurld's bestest panel on a meh system every day. Better Down/Upscaling and streaming performance is worth the odd few-thousand nits for 90 plus percent of use cases.
100ppi makes each pixel 0.254mm. I'm not sure my eyes have ever been that good and they've not got better with age.
Scrolling LED displays, departure boards and the like, are perfectly good at 5ppi. Typical text LCD displays are about 40ppi. It's all about use case.
You don't need the same pixel density as something handheld on something a few metres away.
4k at 50" is about 44" across, and 3840 pixels, that's under 90ppi.
A larger screen obviously has even lower density.
Of course Wii controllers aren't smashing into TVs as often any more... so this is probably limited to to rollable displays (which could be really quite nice in various circumstances, but are almost certainly niche to say the least)
If you are thinking in terms of traditional screens, you dont need these sort of flexible / foldable screens.
Who needs a foldable screen if it's going to be used as a traditional TV all the time at a fixed location? Unless you plan to unfold a 30-50 inch screen wherever you are to watch tv?
Think of more unusual possibilities -
An ebook reader which actually folds open like a traditional book.
Clothing which displays whatever you want it to show.
Screens as curtains, so you can view whatever you want (even use as a TV) when you want.
Screens as coffee mats / table cloths, etc - so you can read/view the news/book when you are having a meal.
Flexible phones, such as those shown in the Ultraviolet movie (not necessarily from a vending machine / throwaway, but still that design can be cool).
Even as wallpaper, with designs changing to suit your every wish (assuming it's cheap and power efficient enough to use as wallpaper for a room or home).
Some of the above examples, you don't really need high PPI. Some uses may need higher PPI.
> Who needs a foldable screen if it's going to be used as a traditional TV all the time at a fixed location?
I would love to have a TV screen that rolled up like a projector screen.
Most of the day it could be rolled away, giving access to a lot of wall space for bookshelves or pretty much anything better looking than a blank screen. You could have a sensible size of screen for newscasts and repeats of Fawlty Towers, then unroll the honking great one to cover the whole wall for the opening to Star Wars (what the youngsters call "Episode IV").
Or have one unroll from the ceiling at the foot of the bed for a sing along to Rocky Horror on a lazy Sunday morning: far taller & wider than you'd get with one of those "rises from the footboard" contraptions.
Yep, I immediately thought of this Black Mirror episode: The Entire History of You
> Transparent & tiny high capacity battery. - No Tick
Wireless power, radiated from a watch-like device. With a bone conduction effector on the end of your index finger, you take a phone call by sticking your index finger into your ear and simultaneously powering up the display on your contact lens.
Whilst you pretend to be a secret agent or bodyguard from a Hollywood film.
You might be pretending to be a secret agent, but you'll look like a gibbering idiot, walking around town talking to yourself with your finger in your ear.
Just put a battery pack somewhere less obvious, like under your ribcage, with a wire running to your head. And, pray you never need an MRI.
A head-mounted display!
Perhaps a forehead one with emojis or brain driven messaging... "My goodness you are a bigger $@*& than when we last met", "would you like to come back to my place bouncy bouncy"... OK, most likely ads <sigh>. I have seen a few people where "Coke is it" or "Rent this space" might work.
First, one could put on various surfaces of a car to tell the idiot who tailgating you what you think of him, or the guy blasting out rap at 150dB to turn it down.
What I'd really like to see would be a monitor that rolls up like an old fashioned home movie screen. Say in the 22" to 27" FHD range.
We can all play at Minority Report or that deadly game of battleships (World Domination) from Never Say Never Again.
Or just use it in the living room window: switch it on at twilight and let the neighbours see your lively cocktail party, instead of the old pizza boxes as you slump in front of Sweeney reruns.
OTOH, if you watched the video for the display, just imagine how much fun could be had hacking into all those video walls in the shopping mall: if you thought that an Imax could make you dizzy or believe you're falling, what about when you are really walking one way but the scenery isn't *quite* keeping up with you...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
