Competing technologies

Field Emission Technologies (of which Sony owns 37%) plans to mass-produce FED TVs in 2009. FED (Field Emission Displays) offers better picture quality than LCDs, and require half the energy (as they do not required backlighting). At first the TVs will be 26" in size, and later on they plan to produce 60" TVs.

I recently had the chance to interview Mr. Corey Hewitt and Dr. James Buntaine from Kodak OLED Systems. Kodak is where OLEDs were first discovered, and they are still in the fore-front of the technology. This is going to be a long article - these guys have given me a lot of background info, even before answering my questions. But first let's introduce Corey and James:

Mitsubishi says that ther Laser-TVs are ready to hit the stores at Q3 2008. The "LaserVue" TVs will come in 65" and 73". Mitsubishi is not telling much about the technology, but they say taht the color gamut is twice the ones of 'traditional HDTVs'. The sets run at 120Hz, at 500 nits of brightness - pretty much like LCD/Plasma TV sets. The TVs are quite thick, though, at 10-inch.

According to E-Ink's Executive, e-newspapers are set to "explode" in late 2009. E-Ink claims that some newspapers in Japan, America and Europe are all considering making the move to e-paper. They will begin trials at the end of 2008 (several thousands of terminals).

Sharp's Miyuki Nakayama : "Organic EL screens like that just aren't a threat to LCD and they won't be for at least another decade. The picture quality is superb, but the screens don't last long and they can't easily be made bigger."

Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT) reports that it got authorization from ITRI (Taiwan's Research Institute) to use their organic TFT (OTFT) tech. CPT will be developing active-matrix flexible displays.

Panasonic's visual products and display devices business senior vice president and director, Masaaki Fujita, said that OLEDs will replace LCDs in the future. Plasma will still get developed, but LCDs will surely be replaced by OLED. He says that Plasma has a better future than LCDs because of the self-illuminating nature (no need for backlight), and also because of its low manufacturing cost.

Sony has given an interesting presentation at SID. It seems like that the power efficiency depends on the TV program. In most programs OLED fares better than LCDs. (see the slide photo to the right)

E-Ink has a new display - based on Segmented-Display-Cell (SDC). It means that the new displays are 40% thinner, and are more flexible. The new displays can be formed in non-rectangular shapes, which allows for nice new designs. Delphi will be using the new display in their future keyfob products.

QD Vision doesn’t yet have a commercial product, but if its development efforts are successful, it could find itself at the center of a revolution in display technology. Current liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and even cutting-edge organic LED, or OLEDs, are illuminated by electricity-thirsty fluorescent backlights and produce muddy, impure shades of red, green, and blue. By contrast, QD Vision’s “quantum dots”—tiny semiconductor crystals only a few nanometers in diameter—produce highly pure colors when stimulated by electrons, and require much less electricity in order to glow brightly.