For the seven decades following the debut of television at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, the term "cathode ray tube" (CRT) was virtually synonymous with "display." Shortly after the turn of the millennium, liquid crystal display (LCD) technology began to replace the venerable CRT in desktop-computer applications, and by the middle of the decade LCD was rapidly squeezing the CRT out the television market that the latter had invented. Just two years ago, it seemed obvious that the display space was in the final stages of a relatively straightforward evolutionary shift, with LCD replacing the CRT in the same way that the gas-powered automobile had replaced the horse and buggy.
Or so it seemed, then.
In 2009, it turns out that the future of display technology is decidedly more complex than a simple evolutionary advance from one technology to another, because multiple display technologies are on the near-term horizon, and they'll most likely all coexist with one another in a display ecosystem that consists of many different niches and market segments. None of them will enjoy the kind of hegemony that CRT had in its heyday.
In the near-term, a new generation of LCD panels is poised to revolutionize the television market with power-sipping displays that are 1 inch thin, boast very high contrast ratios, and can hang on the wall like a framed poster. The secret is in the new style of backlighting—the new displays replace compact fluorescent lamps with white LEDs that use much less power and enable a thinner screen profile.
While the LCD-backlit LED has so far brought incremental advances to the mobile-computing space, the place where it's poised to have the most dramatic impact is in televisions. A high-end LCD HDTV has a contrast ratio of about 30,000:1, whereas LED LCDs have contrast ratios between 1,000,000:1 and 2,000,000:1. Power consumption and weight savings of LED-backlit LCDs are between 30 and 50 percent, and these savings translate into very attractive form factors—the latest LED LCD TVs from Sharp and others are only a little over 1 inch thick, despite their large (46 inch and up) screen sizes.
Research firm iSuppli recently predicted that the percentage of these LED-backlit TVs will grow from 3 percent of TV sales in 2009 to 39 percent in 2013.
With LED LCD poised to dominate at ever larger screen sizes, the smaller end of the screen size spectrum will soon belong to organic LED (OLED). The viewing angle for OLED screens is very wide, and it derives its unique visual effect from the fact that each individual pixel on the screen consists of a glowing LED. So, unlike even the LED LCD technology, an OLED needs no backlighting because the pixel grid itself is an array of colored lights. Such "active-matrix" OLED displays are also brighter than active-matrix LCD technology (TFT-LCD), and they maintain 100 percent of their color gamut at all gray levels.
Not only do OLED screens have every other screen technology beat in the contrast and brightness departments, they're also thinner. Sony's 11-inch XEL-1 is currently the only commercially available OLED TV, and it boasts a thickness of 3 millimeters. LG has announced a 15-inch OLED TV that will be a scant 0.85 millimeters thick, which will launch Korea at the end of this year.
You might think that with all of these benefits, OLED would be poised to take the living room by storm and put the brakes on the aforementioned LED LCD HDTV trend. Unfortunately, OLED has been confined to small screen sizes, and that will probably continue to be the case for a while.
There are a few problems that need to be solved before OLED screens can be fabricated at larger sizes. Once those problems are solved, and they soon will be, then biggest obstacle of all looms: Costly fabrication facilities will need to be built, and that takes either money, which cash-strapped companies are hoarding right now, or credit, which is still hard to come by. But once credit loosens up and those fabs come online, OLED will finally be able to break out of its small-screen niche.
Ultimately, OLED has potential applications far beyond HDTV. OLED displays can be printed on a flexible plastic substrate, and foldable screens with the thickness of a credit card have already been demonstrated at CES 2009. Clear OLED screens will also eventually be possible, so that a window in your house could double as a TV screen.
While thin, flexible OLED displays will be put to some novel uses when they arrive, they probably won't replace the printed page—that job will fall to E-Ink technology, which is already used by Amazon's Kindle and competing e-book readers from Sony and others. Right now, most E-Ink users are reading books and periodicals with the technology, but soon, business users will be able to eliminate most of their laser printing by viewing word processor files, spreadsheets, PDFs, and other business documents on an 8½ x 11 E-Ink screen. Indeed, Amazon's Kindle DX is aimed at precisely this type of application, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made clear at the product's launch that he had priced it to compete with laser printer ink refills.
E-Ink works by embedding a grid of particles on a page; these particles are black on one side, and white on the other, and applying an electrical charge to them causes them to flip. Because an E-Ink screen only uses electricity when it is being changed or refreshed, devices based on the technology have excellent battery life. (The display is typically the largest power draw in a modern mobile device.)
E-Ink's ultra-low power usage and daylight readability make it an ideal replacement for printing in another application: signs. Signs in grocery stores for displaying product prices and specials were among the earliest commercial uses for E-Ink, and as the technology gets cheaper and gains new features like color and faster refresh times, it will see more widespread use in such signage applications.
2009 is the first year that we're really seeing all of the display types mentioned here—LED LCD, OLED, E-Ink, and legacy CFL LCD, plasma and others—all coexist in the market and establish themselves in their respective niches. Each of these technologies has its own development track, backers, and ideal use cases, and in some applications they'll compete with one another. But by the end of this year, many early-adopter households will have at least one example of each display type, all finding different uses. Clearly, the future of display belongs not to one technology, but to many.
About HIM-I AM A FAN OF THE BAND"HIM"
Thursday, 3 September 2009
Future of the Screen: Terminator-Style Augmented-Reality Glasses
The most efficient possible display technology would be something that bypasses the eyes altogether and sends information straight to the brain. Sadly, cranial USB ports are still pretty hard to install. The second most efficient possible display technology anyone's devised projects images directly into the eye. The dream of a wearable virtual retinal display, or VRD, has been around for nearly two decades; it's on the horizon, but it's still going to be a while until it gets here.
The idea of VRD was first tossed around at the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Lab back around 1991. Thomas Furness, who'd been working on helmet-based displays for the Air Force in the '80s, and research engineer Joel Kollin were part of the team that put together the initial (and enormous) prototype. The concept was that tiny, ultra-low-power lasers could paint an image onto the human retina by scanning across it at high speed, essentially treating it as a tiny TV screen. If you could assemble a set of microscopic red, blue and green lasers, stick them where they could project onto your eyes, and hook them up to a computer, you could still see whatever you'd normally see, but with three-dimensional, full-color displays of additional information or imagery overlaid on the visible world—an effect called "augmented reality." Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger's sunglasses in Terminator, and you're on the right track.
Prof. Steven Feiner, of Columbia University's computer science department, notes that the potential advantages of retinal displays are energy-efficiency and unobtrusiveness: "What many of us want is something you're always wearing so that you can experience overlaid stuff, as opposed to having to put something on." There is clearly some money to be made with augmented reality, and a Seattle-area company called Microvision has been working on commercial applications of the HITLab's VRD concepts since the early '90s. (More recently, the Japanese printer company Brother Industries has been developing a similar technology, which it calls "retinal imaging display.") The military has paid Microvision to research VRD eyewear for soldiers and pilots, who need to have a lot of information instantly accessible in addition to what's in front of their eyes.
But there are plenty of day-to-day civilian uses for an unobtrusive, full-color "heads-up" display—one that wouldn't require looking away from its users' physical, nonvirtual surroundings. A mobile phone could have a "screen" as large as its user's visual field. Driving directions could appear in front of your eyes while you're looking at the road, even in bright daylight. Cooking wouldn't require shuttling your attention between the stove and a cookbook. Hearing-impaired people could see voice-recognition transcriptions of what people around them were saying. Surgeons could keep watch on their patients' vital signs and medical reference texts without looking away from an operation.
So where are your Terminator shades? In 1992, Furness and Kollin claimed that it would be at least five years until full-on VRD was a reality, and it's been considerably more than that. One problem is that people's eyes don't stand still—in practice, projecting an image onto a retina is like trying to project a movie onto a moving screen. Another is that, while the wearable part of the system may be small, the gear that needs to be hooked up to it is still gigantic; if it's not portable, it's not very useful.
Still, Dr. Bruce H. Thomas, the director of the Wearable Computer Lab at the University of South Australia, believes that "in the near future we might actually see head-mounted displays become consumer products because of iPods—a legitimate video delivery unit that lots of people carry around with them." In the meantime, primitive VRD has begun to appear in the real world. Microvision released the Nomad Expert Technician System in 2004. (It cost $4,000 a unit and only projected images in red; Honda ordered some for their training centers, but the NETS never caught on, and was discontinued by 2006.) And Brother announced last year that it was hoping to make their retinal imaging display device commercially available sometime in 2010. Maybe by then it'll be small enough for a non-Schwarzenegger-sized person to carry around.(Future of the Screen: After the CRT, a Display Deluge)----------
For the seven decades following the debut of television at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, the term "cathode ray tube" (CRT) was virtually synonymous with "display." Shortly after the turn of the millennium, liquid crystal display (LCD) technology began to replace the venerable CRT in desktop-computer applications, and by the middle of the decade LCD was rapidly squeezing the CRT out the television market that the latter had invented. Just two years ago, it seemed obvious that the display space was in the final stages of a relatively straightforward evolutionary shift, with LCD replacing the CRT in the same way that the gas-powered automobile had replaced the horse and buggy.
Or so it seemed, then.
In 2009, it turns out that the future of display technology is decidedly more complex than a simple evolutionary advance from one technology to another, because multiple display technologies are on the near-term horizon, and they'll most likely all coexist with one another in a display ecosystem that consists of many different niches and market segments. None of them will enjoy the kind of hegemony that CRT had in its heyday.
In the near-term, a new generation of LCD panels is poised to revolutionize the television market with power-sipping displays that are 1 inch thin, boast very high contrast ratios, and can hang on the wall like a framed poster. The secret is in the new style of backlighting—the new displays replace compact fluorescent lamps with white LEDs that use much less power and enable a thinner screen profile.
While the LCD-backlit LED has so far brought incremental advances to the mobile-computing space, the place where it's poised to have the most dramatic impact is in televisions. A high-end LCD HDTV has a contrast ratio of about 30,000:1, whereas LED LCDs have contrast ratios between 1,000,000:1 and 2,000,000:1. Power consumption and weight savings of LED-backlit LCDs are between 30 and 50 percent, and these savings translate into very attractive form factors—the latest LED LCD TVs from Sharp and others are only a little over 1 inch thick, despite their large (46 inch and up) screen sizes.
Research firm iSuppli recently predicted that the percentage of these LED-backlit TVs will grow from 3 percent of TV sales in 2009 to 39 percent in 2013.
With LED LCD poised to dominate at ever larger screen sizes, the smaller end of the screen size spectrum will soon belong to organic LED (OLED). The viewing angle for OLED screens is very wide, and it derives its unique visual effect from the fact that each individual pixel on the screen consists of a glowing LED. So, unlike even the LED LCD technology, an OLED needs no backlighting because the pixel grid itself is an array of colored lights. Such "active-matrix" OLED displays are also brighter than active-matrix LCD technology (TFT-LCD), and they maintain 100 percent of their color gamut at all gray levels.
Not only do OLED screens have every other screen technology beat in the contrast and brightness departments, they're also thinner. Sony's 11-inch XEL-1 is currently the only commercially available OLED TV, and it boasts a thickness of 3 millimeters. LG has announced a 15-inch OLED TV that will be a scant 0.85 millimeters thick, which will launch Korea at the end of this year.
You might think that with all of these benefits, OLED would be poised to take the living room by storm and put the brakes on the aforementioned LED LCD HDTV trend. Unfortunately, OLED has been confined to small screen sizes, and that will probably continue to be the case for a while.
There are a few problems that need to be solved before OLED screens can be fabricated at larger sizes. Once those problems are solved, and they soon will be, then biggest obstacle of all looms: Costly fabrication facilities will need to be built, and that takes either money, which cash-strapped companies are hoarding right now, or credit, which is still hard to come by. But once credit loosens up and those fabs come online, OLED will finally be able to break out of its small-screen niche.
Ultimately, OLED has potential applications far beyond HDTV. OLED displays can be printed on a flexible plastic substrate, and foldable screens with the thickness of a credit card have already been demonstrated at CES 2009. Clear OLED screens will also eventually be possible, so that a window in your house could double as a TV screen.
While thin, flexible OLED displays will be put to some novel uses when they arrive, they probably won't replace the printed page—that job will fall to E-Ink technology, which is already used by Amazon's Kindle and competing e-book readers from Sony and others. Right now, most E-Ink users are reading books and periodicals with the technology, but soon, business users will be able to eliminate most of their laser printing by viewing word processor files, spreadsheets, PDFs, and other business documents on an 8½ x 11 E-Ink screen. Indeed, Amazon's Kindle DX is aimed at precisely this type of application, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made clear at the product's launch that he had priced it to compete with laser printer ink refills.
E-Ink works by embedding a grid of particles on a page; these particles are black on one side, and white on the other, and applying an electrical charge to them causes them to flip. Because an E-Ink screen only uses electricity when it is being changed or refreshed, devices based on the technology have excellent battery life. (The display is typically the largest power draw in a modern mobile device.)
E-Ink's ultra-low power usage and daylight readability make it an ideal replacement for printing in another application: signs. Signs in grocery stores for displaying product prices and specials were among the earliest commercial uses for E-Ink, and as the technology gets cheaper and gains new features like color and faster refresh times, it will see more widespread use in such signage applications.
2009 is the first year that we're really seeing all of the display types mentioned here—LED LCD, OLED, E-Ink, and legacy CFL LCD, plasma and others—all coexist in the market and establish themselves in their respective niches. Each of these technologies has its own development track, backers, and ideal use cases, and in some applications they'll compete with one another. But by the end of this year, many early-adopter households will have at least one example of each display type, all finding different uses. Clearly, the future of display belongs not to one technology, but to many.
For the seven decades following the debut of television at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, the term "cathode ray tube" (CRT) was virtually synonymous with "display." Shortly after the turn of the millennium, liquid crystal display (LCD) technology began to replace the venerable CRT in desktop-computer applications, and by the middle of the decade LCD was rapidly squeezing the CRT out the television market that the latter had invented. Just two years ago, it seemed obvious that the display space was in the final stages of a relatively straightforward evolutionary shift, with LCD replacing the CRT in the same way that the gas-powered automobile had replaced the horse and buggy.
Or so it seemed, then.
In 2009, it turns out that the future of display technology is decidedly more complex than a simple evolutionary advance from one technology to another, because multiple display technologies are on the near-term horizon, and they'll most likely all coexist with one another in a display ecosystem that consists of many different niches and market segments. None of them will enjoy the kind of hegemony that CRT had in its heyday.
In the near-term, a new generation of LCD panels is poised to revolutionize the television market with power-sipping displays that are 1 inch thin, boast very high contrast ratios, and can hang on the wall like a framed poster. The secret is in the new style of backlighting—the new displays replace compact fluorescent lamps with white LEDs that use much less power and enable a thinner screen profile.
While the LCD-backlit LED has so far brought incremental advances to the mobile-computing space, the place where it's poised to have the most dramatic impact is in televisions. A high-end LCD HDTV has a contrast ratio of about 30,000:1, whereas LED LCDs have contrast ratios between 1,000,000:1 and 2,000,000:1. Power consumption and weight savings of LED-backlit LCDs are between 30 and 50 percent, and these savings translate into very attractive form factors—the latest LED LCD TVs from Sharp and others are only a little over 1 inch thick, despite their large (46 inch and up) screen sizes.
Research firm iSuppli recently predicted that the percentage of these LED-backlit TVs will grow from 3 percent of TV sales in 2009 to 39 percent in 2013.
With LED LCD poised to dominate at ever larger screen sizes, the smaller end of the screen size spectrum will soon belong to organic LED (OLED). The viewing angle for OLED screens is very wide, and it derives its unique visual effect from the fact that each individual pixel on the screen consists of a glowing LED. So, unlike even the LED LCD technology, an OLED needs no backlighting because the pixel grid itself is an array of colored lights. Such "active-matrix" OLED displays are also brighter than active-matrix LCD technology (TFT-LCD), and they maintain 100 percent of their color gamut at all gray levels.
Not only do OLED screens have every other screen technology beat in the contrast and brightness departments, they're also thinner. Sony's 11-inch XEL-1 is currently the only commercially available OLED TV, and it boasts a thickness of 3 millimeters. LG has announced a 15-inch OLED TV that will be a scant 0.85 millimeters thick, which will launch Korea at the end of this year.
You might think that with all of these benefits, OLED would be poised to take the living room by storm and put the brakes on the aforementioned LED LCD HDTV trend. Unfortunately, OLED has been confined to small screen sizes, and that will probably continue to be the case for a while.
There are a few problems that need to be solved before OLED screens can be fabricated at larger sizes. Once those problems are solved, and they soon will be, then biggest obstacle of all looms: Costly fabrication facilities will need to be built, and that takes either money, which cash-strapped companies are hoarding right now, or credit, which is still hard to come by. But once credit loosens up and those fabs come online, OLED will finally be able to break out of its small-screen niche.
Ultimately, OLED has potential applications far beyond HDTV. OLED displays can be printed on a flexible plastic substrate, and foldable screens with the thickness of a credit card have already been demonstrated at CES 2009. Clear OLED screens will also eventually be possible, so that a window in your house could double as a TV screen.
While thin, flexible OLED displays will be put to some novel uses when they arrive, they probably won't replace the printed page—that job will fall to E-Ink technology, which is already used by Amazon's Kindle and competing e-book readers from Sony and others. Right now, most E-Ink users are reading books and periodicals with the technology, but soon, business users will be able to eliminate most of their laser printing by viewing word processor files, spreadsheets, PDFs, and other business documents on an 8½ x 11 E-Ink screen. Indeed, Amazon's Kindle DX is aimed at precisely this type of application, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made clear at the product's launch that he had priced it to compete with laser printer ink refills.
E-Ink works by embedding a grid of particles on a page; these particles are black on one side, and white on the other, and applying an electrical charge to them causes them to flip. Because an E-Ink screen only uses electricity when it is being changed or refreshed, devices based on the technology have excellent battery life. (The display is typically the largest power draw in a modern mobile device.)
E-Ink's ultra-low power usage and daylight readability make it an ideal replacement for printing in another application: signs. Signs in grocery stores for displaying product prices and specials were among the earliest commercial uses for E-Ink, and as the technology gets cheaper and gains new features like color and faster refresh times, it will see more widespread use in such signage applications.
2009 is the first year that we're really seeing all of the display types mentioned here—LED LCD, OLED, E-Ink, and legacy CFL LCD, plasma and others—all coexist in the market and establish themselves in their respective niches. Each of these technologies has its own development track, backers, and ideal use cases, and in some applications they'll compete with one another. But by the end of this year, many early-adopter households will have at least one example of each display type, all finding different uses. Clearly, the future of display belongs not to one technology, but to many.
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