Sony demos ultra-expensive, ultra-thin OLED telly View a more bandwidth-friendly version of this video here Can't see the video? Download Flash Player from Adobe.com Sony_XEL1_SM
I have spent years walking past/in various electrical shops looking at the quality of LCD televisions and wondering why on earth anyone would buy one. I am yet to see one that doesn't blur on movement, esp fast movement.
As everyone and their dog was buying LCD and raving about them, I thought it was just my eyes, so I went to ask the chap behind the desk and he agreed with me and said that the quality is not that good but if someone wants something big and thin to hang on their wall, LCD is the only option.
So, I have continued to benefit from this by buying our latest flatscreen (not LCD) 28 inch television for £38 from someone who had 'upgraded' to LCD. job done!
OLED appears to be what LCD should have been, and the example I saw in our local Sony shop simply blew me away. It was amazing. Unfortunately the price is too high and the screen sizes too small, but the same could have been said about LCD 6-8 years ago so we just need to wait.
Is it just me or does OLED tech seem to be in the same place as SSDs right now? Not only is it far too expensive (I'd never pay 3 grand for a TV set, no matter how fantastic it is), but it's also too small (11" isn't even big enough for the kitchen or a small bedroom!).
The tech is great, but we're still years away from seeing this in living rooms - wait until the digital switchover in the UK has finished (i.e. 2012 Olympics) and wake me up again then....
I'm typing this on a two year old Sony notebook. The battery life is down to fifteen minutes, the screen coating has started to fail and the letters have started to rub off the keyboard. Sony have refused to fix the machine because I wiped XP off the hard drive and replaced it with Linux.
Then they hit us with the Sony root kit fiasco.
Then they released 'Quantum of Solace' which contained so much DRM that it wouldn't play on some of the DVD players out there.
Sure Sony, your OLED TV set looks fabulous, but I will never purchase another Sony product again.
Yeah my dad would like this (hes a bit gadget mad) but....
a) hes not actually clinically mental
b) he'd have to travel over 100 miles to reach a sony centre just to view the item, let alone buy one
c) sony have better TVs for the price
d) the tv is not wall mountable since all the electronics are in the stand
e) and dont sony have screens at >50 inches for less than £3000? (save your money and get a big screen that does the same job)
Personally I think Sony need to stop trying to be so cutting edge/overpriced.
This TV isnt much bigger than my hand (or other appendages) and where is an 11inch TV going to go? the kitchen? the bedroom? I can't see it going in my living room as the main TV unless it gets to 22 inches or bigger.
The only way anyone could justify ending up with one of these is as a gift from some one else (your cat/dog/child doesnt count), much like those LCD photo frames people get but never use. I cant see how anyone could justify buying one for themselves. its just far too expensive compared with competing products (just as the PS3 was when it first came out compared with the Xbox and Wii). To put it another way.. I can get a car for 3000.
The naked eye cant tell the difference between 1ms delays and 6ms delays. Therefore such a quantification is irrelevant. Think about it, how many people have switched from DVD to bluray yet? Not many, and I think the reason is the naked eye cant really tell much difference between the picture quality... not enough to justify buying all new equipment and replacements to DVDs.
The only people that will buy this are people who have been, or want to be, on Cribs some day.
According to Moore's Law these items will start selling in 2-4 years once the size has doubled and the price has halved.
Presumably with such high contrast ratio dead pixels become a FAR bigger issue as they stand out more? Whats sony's policy on this??
In case you can't view the video at work, it really is £3000 and is initially only available from Sony Centres.
Recession - what recession ? There are still many City types with more money than sense - even after losing a lot of our money and being bailed out by the government.
Another useless video. It's thin. It works. Fine. Anyone ever noticed how looking at super-advanced screens on your not super-advanced screen is rather pointless, assuming you want to know anything about the quality of the picture?
The day they (all of them) get off the darn "glossy everything" fad will be declared an international holiday. Also, I could not care less about the über-thinness of flatscreens, especially when "skinny" means it comes with a ginormous blob attached to it. Good picture, low energy consumption, decent price. Everything else is just hype & cosmetics.
This is pretty old news, the Sony OLED TV has already been all over the internet and on loads of TV shows including Something for the Weekend which is a cooking show!!
The TV looks amazing but why does the remote look like something from 1980? for £3000 I would want a touch screen OLED remote that also works with the PS3! Come on Sony!
I know alot of people will cry at the £3000 price tag but its the first get of a new technology, remember when Plasma TV's were £20,000, way back, when they first come out!
Once they start to produce these panels in millions rather than the hundreds expect the price to drop like a stone and the size to grow like the Hydroponics "Plant" your mate has in the cupboard
I expect to see these as 20" Professional Monitors and top of the line laptops in less than a year and 32"+ TV's for £1500 within a couple of years!
...of it's alleged superior motion performance - to back up this claim the demonstrator shows footage of a woman eating and a series of static images. Does this explain Sony's PS3 sales strategy, perchance?
Paris, because even though she may not understand it, she might be able to afford it.
Who gives a hoot how thin it is when the only way they saved those few centimeters at most is by moving electronics to a huge base meaning you don't even have the mounting flexibility any more?
I thought we had entered the wireless base to screen era with forthcoming products, only sony would give us small and expensive and anti-ergonomic.
Paris, even this she can understand.
11" for £3000 isn't a bad price if you can't get one for that price from another manufacturer, let alone cheaper...
Pioneering technology isn't supposed to be cheap or reliable, just a demonstration of what the future holds, so I'm going to try to see one of these and dream about what they'll be like when they hit > 30"
"Light-emitting OLED technology eliminates the need for a backlight and achieves a high level of energy efficiency while consuming up to 40 percent less power than conventional 20-inch LCD panels."
Wow. Sony's ELEVEN inch screen uses 40% less power than a TWENTY inch LCD? In other words, Sony's 11" OLED screen, which has a screen area 30.24999% of the area of a 20" screen, only uses 60+% the power of that 20" screen. Or, put another way, the 20" LCD has 230.57861% more screen area than Sony's 11" screen, and only uses up to 40% more power. And they call the OLED screen "energy efficient". For the record, Sharp's 19" LCD uses 45-54% less power than their 20" LCD. Sharp's model LC-20D42U 20" LCD with 10W audio uses 69W. Sharp's model LC-19D44U 19" LCD with 4W audio uses 45W. Sony's model XEL-1 11" OLED with 2W audio uses 34W.
"Experience an unrivaled picture quality. Boasting a 960 x 540 native resolution, the OLED TV yields the same pixel density as a 40" (measured diagonally) 1080p LCD TV."
Yes, a screen that's half the resolution of 1080p will definitely be unrivaled. Nobody else would be stupid enough to try that. Pixel density means nothing if the resolution isn't great enough to handle the input sent to it.
And seriously, who cares how thin the panel itself is when the size of the base means the total unit depth is 6-8"? However, "thin" does mean "breaks more easily when bumped". Yes, you should be careful around your equipment (especially such expensive equipment), but accidents (and children) happen. That was one of the best things about CRTs -- a glass screen meant good protection (not to mention it could be cleaned much more easily without fear of damaging the screen).
But hey, let's not let silly things like facts distort the fantasy of an overpriced piece of bragging rights.
Has anyone actually seen this OLED display in person? No! thats what I thought.
When your local Sony has one on display, go take a look.
£3000 Price tag! You know what they say, if you have to ask, you cant afford it. This is like most First Generation Consumer products.
First Plasma TVs £30,000+ They all broke and suffered from horrible screen burn
First Laser Disc players! £2000+ If I remember rightly, the movies cost a fortune
First Blu Ray players £1000+ Only a handful of movies on Blu Ray to watch!
Large LCD TV's were still around £2000 only a couple years ago and had crap contrast ratios.
Alot of people can afford these and will buy them, these are the people that help pathe the way for the cheaper consumer models that come in time.
"I know alot of people will cry at the £3000 price tag but its the first get of a new technology, remember when Plasma TV's were £20,000, way back, when they first come out!"
Yes but the first plasmas were BIGGER than any other TV you could buy at the time. This thing is pretty much the *smallest* TV you can buy (and it's not even portable). It would certainly be the most expensive TV per inch you could buy now or ever.
I know that thin is in, but @#$% me that's an expensive 11 inches.
11" isn't big enough for the bedroom? You've been spoilt...
For 3k I'd expect the same pixel density and response rate as the eMagin 1/2" HMD screens. And they've just hit SXGA so that'd be hundreds of megapixels on an 11" screen with nS refresh times. Now THAT would be worth the money for the bragging rights. "Oh, look at my TV- non of that HDReady crap, this is Full HD!" "Oh, really? Mine's a higher resolution than real life."
Also,according to a commenter they're saying 1ms response rates- isn't this really slow for an OLED?
Overall, some sort of serious fail for Sony on this one.
I cant see in what way it is different to a floptop screen.. its even about the same size.. ok smaller.
I know its OLED but its not the freaking size that makes me go wow .... I want to know what the power consumption is... (if its too high the screen gets hot drains my pocket and dies in two years...) and the response time the (including the afterglow) and the contrast ratio etc... forgive me for asking for specifics... but I dont buy a car based on how thin/fat/tall/blue/spongy it is!
So, how thin could you get a traditional LCD screen if you backlit with LCDs and relocated the electronics and ports to a huge box sitting underneath the screen rather than behind it? I'm guessing about as thin as that one!
Sure you wouldn't be able to match the contrast ratio or response time, but can the average person tell the difference between 50k:1 and <2ms that you see on modern LCDs and get a 50" screen for under 1k, compared to 1m:1 and <0.1ms from an 11" OLED that costs £3k?
I know which one I would prefer to have in my living room!
AC, if you bought a first generation LaserDisc Player it was likely a Philips or Pioneer and built like a tank. Unless the Helium-neon laser tube gave out last year or so it likely still works like a charm. Same for the "expensive" movies. Yes, they cost more than Blu-ray does today, but they were BIG, had no DRM or ARM whatsoever and demanded a cleanroom to be made. Which is why they don't die either. Unless you bought those rotters that came out of SONY plants, as even back then SONY was unable to make something that doesn't break within a year or two.
When flatscreens came to market, they were the size of big-screen tubes or bigger. The issue with this TV is that while the technology might be amazing (hardly anyone knows because you need to see them in person) it is overall a pointless desk toy for managers. This is not the 50s where you would put a dedicated chair in front of the tube at two feet distance and oh-ah at the novelty. This 11inch screen is just a tech-demo gone commercial. They can come back once its 40"+, half the price, and someone can tell how fast those OLEDs crap out.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
