Sony promises 27in OLED screen

Sony has revealed plans to launch a 27in OLED screen within 12 months, but the bad news is that it’ll be expensive. Speaking at a US conference, Howard Stringer, the electronics giant’s CEO, said that by May 2009 Sony “will come out with a 27in version”. Stringer didn’t reveal where the set would appear first or how much it …

[Wonderkid]

As display quality improves...

...so programming quality falls. Warts and all. 'twas so much better in black and white and 12" deep...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooo Ooo Ooo

Must get one, then whine when they drop the price six months later...

[Thomas]

Flat displays still all look worse than CRTs to me...

... although increasingly it's only flashpoints like pixel-sized scrolling chequered patterns and static, continuous smooth gradients that show the difference. How do OLEDs compare to decent CRTs?

[Andy Kay]

noticeable?

so who sits 3 inches away from their TV to notice the difference in this anyway? Isnt the norm to sit about 4 metres away from screen? shorter lifespan than normal LCD? how the hell are they going to sell?

[Tom]

@Andy

One of the main advantages of OLED over LCD is acceptance angle - the colours do not change as you view the screen from different angles. I believe this is because LCD requires a backlight and OLED doesn't.

[adnim]

Promises, promises.

I promise not to buy one.

[The Starglider]

It's early days...

I'm personally looking forward to the future of OLED. Remember that plasma and LCD used to cost a lot and didn't last as long as they do now. Give it time and I can see OLED being the standard of flat panel TVs and monitors in the years to come.

[Steve]

Greenies

The O in OLED is Organic, so just let Tesco put them on display beside the 'organic' veggies (daft name, who wants /inorganic/ veggies?) and all the Greenies will be buying them to help save the environment. PT Barnum will be laughing...

[Edwin]

Lifespan

is that really a big deal? the study revealed 5.7 and 6.9 of continuous use, which (in my house) is probably 15-20 years, by which time the tech will be old, the electronics dead etc etc etc.

I may hang on to my CRT for a bit and wait for decent OLED screens at reasonable prices...

[Liam]

i was waiting for this tech...

finally bit the bullet and got a high end LCD 42" after realising they are miles off large screens.

bought 2 'BT domus' cordless phones a few weeks ago. they use OLD screens. both phones' screens died in less than 2 weeks!

wow, now that is a short lifespan!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Flat displays still all look worse than CRTs to me...

Well IMHO the main sources of trouble are

(a) resampling to the resolution of the display [often some weird size like 1366x768 unrelated to any TV standard]

(b) colour quantization, which can interact badly with compression artifacts to produce mosquito noise

Both these things are features of digitizing the picture, and can be helped (or made worse) by clever signal processing; but I wouldn't expect OLED to make any systematic difference compared to LCD.

At least it should have better contrast ratio, viewing angle and efficiency than LCD. Pity about the poor lifetime. And the cost...

Nick

[Fab De Marco]

@ Steve

The Greenies will be buying them to save the environment, another selling point to them is that they use less power that normal LCD's owing to no "Constantly on" Back Light. OLED technology has been used in mobile phones for years, they seem reliabale enough.

As with all new technology Early adopters will be punished. They will pay a lot of money for something that will be cheaper and more reliable in 6 months time.

[Vance P. Frickey]

Cutting edge=Bleeding edge

You can go through thrift shops in rich neighborhoods and see what happens to overpriced, underengineered stuff from the big manufacturers. Eventually it gets replaced with stuff that works and doesn't cost nearly as much (or nearly as much per diagonal inch in the case of televisions).

I'd wait a little while before buying an OLED display, if only because I DO remember how wonky the first large plasma and LCD displays were. Curve balls resembled snowy meteors, color registration wasn't all it could have been... I'd invest in more proven, highly developed technology, with better image quality. But that's just me.

[Phil B]

Re - Display Quality

I'm still waiting for a HD ready TV that can display moving pictures in HD as well as stills. The only display technology capable of doing this at the moment is CRT, so why doesn't anybody produce a HD ready CRT TV!!! SED and OLED are both capable of matching the CRT in fast response time, but both seem to have unending development problems and are likely to be initially expensive, so let's go back to CRT until it's sorted please.