Universal Display has quietly released a new PHOLED material performance chart. Their Green-Yellow material now has 1.4 million lifetime hours (LT50), and their Red color offers 900,000 hours. Blue is still very challenging, and their light blue offers only 20,000 hours (LT50).
20,000 hours to half brightness for the blue OLED phosphor might not be a problem at all, in the context of mobile phone displays. Consider that most mobile phone contracts are two years. If you had your OLED mobile phone on 24 hours a day the blue OLED phosphor would continue to be fairly bright for 833 days.
…and it looks even better when you lift the lid to find this optional 300-nit 1920 x 1080 screen. Yes, while Apple fans still have to settle for a 1680 x 1050 pixel picture in a 15-inch chassis, an extra $150 $100 buys the XPS 15z a full 1080p display, allowing for high-res movies, games, and wonderfully roomy split-screen multitasking. It’s a pretty bright, beautiful picture on this particular screen, too, and though the contrast isn’t quite as high as we’d like, Dell’s software will automatically adjust the backlight to give you the best out of your blacks and whites. It’s also quite glossy, unfortunately, and viewing angles are pretty terrible here, as the picture becomes far less vibrant if you shift your head even slightly to the left or right.
Why would Dell use a crappy LCD on what I would consider the company’s halo thin and light notebook PC? Large shifts in brightness, color, and contrast at wide viewing angles are just not acceptable. The extra pixels (1920×1080) compared to the MacBook Pro (1680×1050) are welcome, but those pixels are crappy pixels.
Tech-On!: Sony showcased its flexible display made of organic TFTs (Thin Film Transistors). The 13.3-inch O-TFT flexible display has a curvature radius of 5 mm, a pixel format of 1600×1200 good for a resolution of 150 ppi.
Flexibility in an e-paper-like display is most important because it lends to durability, just like paper. Some think rollable displays are exciting. I’m not one of them, because although I appreciate the beauty of antiques (e.g. ancient scrolls) I don’t see rolled up documents integrating well into our lives. On the other hand, I am excited about foldable displays: imagine a small smartphone-like device with a display that can fold out to the size of a tablet. Foldable displays can solve one of the main challenges we have today in electronics: portability versus usability, largely limited by display technology and size.
Dell: The XPS 15z is, “The thinnest 15-inch PC on the planet,” according to Dell. The 15z does look sexy thin.
But, the hardware industrial design reminds me of HP. And HP designs remind me of Apple. In a world filled with brilliant designers, material science engineers, mechanical engineers, etc. I wonder why the very best notebook designs coming out of HP and Dell all look very similar to Apple’s MacBook Pros.
Would it be an exaggeration to claim Dell and HP are in the business of copying Apple’s overall designs for their notebooks? Or maybe all of these brilliant designers and engineers are moving in sync toward a singular optimal hardware design for notebooks? I think there is plenty of room left for creativity in the space of notebook hardware industrial design. Designs that have little resemblance to today’s MacBook Pros.
By the way, The Dell XPS 15z is not the thinnest 15-inch PC on the planet. The XPS 15z is 0.02 inches fatter (0.97 inches) than the two-year old 15-inch MacBook Pro.
Being thin isn’t everything. I would think Dell would have realized that. Unfortunately by pushing the envelope and not quite getting there it seems Dell is making itself out to be incompetent in both notebook hardware design and marketing. If Dell had been a bit more specific and claim the 15z as the thinnest 15.6-inch notebook PC on the planet… (The MacBook Pro has a 15.4-inch display.)
There is one thing, well two: the XPS 15z trumps the 15-inch MacBook Pro in one important area. The XPS 15z display has a 1920×1080 pixel format. The 15-inch MacBook Pro maxes out at 1680×1050.
And the other is price: the Dell XPS 15z will start at US$1534, which is much lower than that of a 15-inch MacBook Pro. Update: The starting price is even lower at $999.
If you’ve been looking for a thin and light 15-inch notebook PC but balked at the high entry price of the MacBook Pro, the Dell XPS 15z might be your cup of tea. Just don’t be fooled into thinking it’s the thinnest.
Barnes & Noble has introduced the All-New NOOK. It still sports a 6-inch E Ink display, but the new Pearl E Ink features 50% more contrast than the E Ink that was used in the first NOOK. The more contrasty E Ink display is also faster with 80% less flashing, the flashing that happens when content is updated on E Ink displays.
The All-New NOOK is 35% lighter (7.48 ounces, 212 grams) and 15% thinner than the original. The battery lasts for up to two months on a single charge with WiFi off, which is about twice as long as the Kindle.
The most important feature in my mind is that the All-New NOOK now sports touch capability. Instead of a touch layer on top of the E Ink display that degrade contrast and the experience of reading, the latest touch solutions use infrared and that includes the All-New NOOK.
By adding touch you can make notes, highlight, doodle, etc. Natural almost necessary things you do on a book, and now things you can do on an e-book in your All-New NOOK.
Touch is also required to navigate. The All-New NOOK might look like a mere e-reader on the surface, but underneath is Android 2.1, an OS that will enable the All-New NOOK to act like a tablet with some under-the-hood tweaking.
The price is US$139 and you can pre-order online and in stores now. The All-New NOOK will start shipping on June 10, when you can also pick one up at BestBuy, Walmart, Books-A-Million, and Staples.
Today was browse-the-exhibitions day for me. I have been interested in the development of E Ink displays for quite some time and it seems the company is making some progress toward integrating color and touch into its E Ink displays, which dominate e-book readers of today.
Although I was happy to see working demonstrations of color E Ink displays at SID 2011, there were two areas that need major improvements. First, as you can see from the photo above, color does not show very well on color E Ink displays. Granted these were only the first iteration of color and the colors were limited to just 4096 greyscales, but the lack of richness in the colors dampened my enthusiasm somewhat.
Two, touch responsiveness. Sony took the lead in integrating touch with E Ink displays with mixed results. The first iteration, the PRS-600, made use of a touch layer on top of the E Ink display. The result was an innovative idea: a possible paper replacement notepad, but with a reflective (as in glare), dull display. Writing was great, reading wasn’t. Sony later replaced the touch layer with IR-based touch technology, which improved the E Ink display’s readability. I played around with the E Ink CDK (Color Development Kit) and the main focus area for companies that integrate touch unto the Triton E Ink display will need to be touch responsiveness. When you have to wait for the display to respond when you’re writing, the experience is something you’d rather not repeat too often.
I was excited about color and touch, but I was also a little disappointed. There was one area that did not disappoint: high resolution E Ink displays. The photo above is of the E Ink Triton 9.7-inch EPD with a 2400×1650 pixel format good for 300 dpi.
The photo above has not been retouched in any way and shows just how crisp the 300-dpi E Ink display is. The bit depth is limited to just four so we can expect a major boost in greyscale improvements. And with better rendering algorithms the reading experience from a high resolution E Ink display like this one should be most excellent. There was also a 9.68-inch 1600×1200 pixel format version good for 206 dpi with very good readability, but I’m hoping the 300-dpi version will make it into the next e-readers from Amazon and the like.
Next year, the average thickness of LCD panels used in smart phones and tablet PCs is going to be reduced down to 0.3mm. At present, the figure stands at approximately 0.5mm.
If the slimmer glass substrate is applied to the Galaxy S2, the newest flagship smart phone of Samsung Electronics, the product thickness can decrease by 0.4mm to 8.5mm.
Thinner and lighter smartphones. Sounds good to me.
The TFT LCD industry has been experiencing an over-supply for more than 12 months and Q1’11 is viewed as rock bottom of this cycle, a result of shipment declines, falling panel prices, and suppliers reducing capacity utilization rates due to a lack of orders and inventory reduction. Excess shipments of LCD TV panels in 2H’10 were the major cause for such a long period of oversupply. However, panel prices started to stabilize at the end of the quarter.
The forecasted 18% Q/Q growth in Q2’11 might be too aggressive because the current tightness is mostly resulting from supply constraints rather than strong demand. LCD panel manufacturers will need to see whether panel orders continue to increase based on optimism for the second half of the year.
First quarter large-area TFT LCD shipments decreased 7% Q/Q, increased 5% Y/Y to 164 million units. Revenues also declined 12% Q/Q and 19% Y/Y to US$17.5 billion.
SID via The Loop:
This year, Apple extended its track record of revolutionizing personal communications technology with the introduction of the industry-leading iPhone 4 Retina display. Packing four times the number of pixels into the same 3.5-in. dia. screen found on earlier iPhone models, the 640×960-pixel Retina display set a new benchmark for mobile display resolution, low power consumption and image quality. Utilizing Mobile IPS (in-plane switching) technology, the iPhone 4 Retina display achieves a viewing angle superior to conventional mobile LCDs, providing an enhanced viewing experience for the end user in virtually any application. The display features a host of technical advancements: customized LTPS TFT backplane with organic passivation and optimized pixel design; user-customizable, auto-adjustable brightness using ambient light sensing; advanced IPS compensation polarizer technology for high contrast (800:1) and color consistency regardless of viewing direction; 8-bit color depth; an ultra-thin, tiny-footprint driver IC; and patent-pending mechanical integration.
It really isn’t Apple that developed the 3.5-inch TFT LCD, branded the Retina Display, but LG Display.
Engadget: The Motorola Droid X 2 will sports a 4.3-inch 960×540 display. It seems the slow transition from 800×480 to 960×540 is accelerating.
DisplayBlog is written and produced by Jin Kim. Subscribe via RSS.