Power consumption

Technocorp Energy (formed by ex-Kodak employees) will license Kodak's OLED Lighting technology from LG. Technocorp plan is to produce efficient OLED panels (70lm/W) at $64/m². This will take time and a lot of effort of course, and the company is looking for funding, partners and joint-ventures to achieve this goal.

Via +PlasticElectronics

Pocketnow reports that Microsoft's engineers chose black backgrounds in Windows Phone 7 because it will be very useful with AMOLEDs (it'll save a lot of energy because OLEDs do not use any power on black pixels). There's also the option for a white background, used to enhance readability.

It's great to hear that Microsoft expects most devices to have AMOLED displays, although this is not really a surprise - back in January we ran a story that Microsoft will advice device makers to use AMOLEDs... 

Remember Samsung's flexible OLED for ID cards or passports? Bundesdruckerei is showing their e-passport that uses that AMOLED display at CeBIT. It still says "future product", but it seems to get getting closer to production every time we see it.

The display is a flexible 2" QVGA (240x320), 260K color OLED with a 10,000:1 contrast ratio. It is very low on power, and actually uses the RF power from the contactless reader - there's no battery at all here.

Samsung Mobile Display's president of engineering Brian Berkeley said yesterday that Samsung is accelerating its development of OLED displays, including increasing  the size and volume to enable rollout of OLED TVs. Samsung has been critical of OLED TVs in the past years, but things are changing: there's high volume AMOLED production, with millions of OLED displays for mobile devices shipping each month.

Samsung 30-inch 3D OLED TV prototype

Samsung are now making huge investments in OLEDs, including development of medium to large sized panels. They are actually working on how to scale a Gen 4 sized plants (like they have today) to a Gen 7 or even a Gen 8, which will be able to make TV panels economically. This will require either much more powerful lasers working much more quickly than today's process for creating the backplane on which they deposit the OLEDs, or some alternative technology. There are also issues in color patterning, for which Samsung thinks it has a new unique solution, and OLED printing.

Berkeley predicts that a 40" OLED TV will use only 10 watts in about five years (compared to 40 watts today for a 40" LCD). He also said that the technology will be great for 3D TVs (image switching is quicker and so left and right images are completely separated).

The OLED100.eu project has won the Best Energy Efficient project award in Europe's ICT (International Telecommunication Union) competition. They actually won it together with Beywatch (tools for environmental management and energy efficiency). Both project will get €10,000 (there were 39 candidates altogether). OLED100.eu have also send us a new photo of a large-area OLED panel (by Philips Research):

Large Area OLED Lighting

OLED100.eu is an integrated European research project to accelerate the development of OLED Lighting technologies. It received €12.5 million funding and focuses on five main goals:

• High power efficacy (100 lm/W)
• Long lifetime (100.000 h)
• Large area (100x100 cm2)
• Low-cost (100 Euro/m2)
• Measurement standardization / application research

A few days ago we posted about DisplayMate's Nexus-One display tests. Basically they are very unhappy with the OLED's performance, especially when compared to the iPhone's LCD.

Now Barry Young from the OLED-Association has sent us his response to these tests:

Last week, there was an incredible amount of Internet chatter, generated by one well-regarded tester (DisplayMate) and one blogger (DisplayBlog) comparing the AMOLED display in the Nexus I with the LTPS LCD in the iPhone.  In short, according to the tester, the AMOLED didn’t measure up. The evaluation was, to my knowledge, the first in-depth scientific comparison of the two displays. Did they help or just confuse the situation? There was a time when display architectures and the measurements of performance were relatively simple:

The DisplayBlog and DisplayMate are working on an interesting series of tests for Google's Nexus One phone AMOLED display and the iPhone's 3GS display. It's not finished yet, but they have posted the first tests of the AMOLED display. There's a lot of technical information, but here are the main conclusions:

• The OLED is 800x480, but uses PenTile technology, that has two-thirds of the total number of sub-pixels found on an 800x480 LCD, so it won’t be quite as sharp as a typical 800x480 display.
• The display has only 16-bits color depth, with just 32 or 64 intensity levels. DisplayMate say this is unacceptable for a high performance phone such as the Nexus One. The colors are coarse and inaccurate as a result. 
• The display is excellent for text, icons and menu graphics, but poor for image and awful for resolution scaling. The problem with resolution scaling lies in the Android OS which uses a "laughably primitive scaling algorithm".
• The peak white brightness is just 229 cd/m2 which is rather poor.
• The black brightness is outstanding (0.0035 cd/m2) - so dark it is hard to measure or even detect.
• The contrast ratio (65416) is great, the highest they have measured for a production display.
• The screen reflectance is relatively high and washes out the image, makes it hard to view in bright conditions. 
• The phone uses Dynamic Color and Dynamic Contrast which results is exaggerated colors and stretching of images.