Display Week 2009: ID Magazine Blog Entries: Day 3

Information Display's "roving reporters" are blogging about what they've discovered at the 47th annual Society for Information Display's Symposium, Seminar & Exhibition. Here are their reports from Day 3:

LCDs
San Antonio, TX; June 3, 2009. One of the cleverest demonstrations at SID 2009 is to be found in the Samsung booth. It is only a technology demonstration at this point, but it has enormous potential. A portrait LCD panel with a white LED backlight is on display. In front of it is a small mobile device with its own display. Aim the device at the large panel and content appears on the small display. What's happening? The information is being transmitted wirelessly from the larger panel. But it isn't Bluetooth and it isn't WiFi and it's probably not anything else you might think of. The data is being transmitted by visible light.

The way this is done is that the output of the backlight LEDs is being modulated at an extremely high rate, and carries the encoded digital data. All you need is a photo-sensor to measure the light output from the panel. According to a Samsung representative, a white LED backlight can be run at about 1 to 2MHz, but an RGB backlight can be run at up to 40MHz per channel, making it possible to stream an enormous amount of data in a very short time. Imagine the possibilities. Your TV could download the TV guide to your remote control so you could view it there rather than interrupt the full screen content. You could use this to drive the rear channel speakers of your surround sound system wirelessly. Or digital signage could send additional information or special offers when you point your cell phone at the display. The possibilities are endless. --Alfred Poor, HDTV Almanac

Backlighting
San Antonio, TX; June 3, 2009. I had the opportunity to tour the exhibition floor today with Munisamy Anandan today. "Anand" is with Organic Lighting Technologies LLC. He is also President Elect of the Society for Information Display, and a recognized expert in backlighting technology.

Anand was impressed with a working MEMs-based color display from Pixtronix. Even though it was a prototype, "I have never seen one to this stage before," he said. The 2.5-in. diagonal display has 80,000 shutters—one for each pixel—that open and close mechanically to let through or shut out light from energy efficient LEDs. Pixtronix claims that the MEMs technology uses approximately 25% less energy than LCD technology.

Another item that caught Anand's eye was a white LED display from Toshiba with a measan time between failure (MTBF) rate of 70,000 hours. Up until now, white LEDs have not lasted nearly this long, and the extended life opens up a range of new display applications for this technology. Jenny Donelan, Information Display

Headworn Displays and Touchscreens
San Antonio, TX; June 3, 2009. Why aren't headworn displays more popular? One of the neat things being shown this year is over in the Kopin booth, where they have SVGA and XGA microdisplays that are full three primary color filter designs. Looking much better than the older frame sequential versions, the SVGA ones are on their way to market in new headworn devices slated for release later this year, and the older VGA versions are on the market now. The XGA displays contain color sub pixels less than 4 microns in width and have an outstanding resolution when viewed through reasonably good optics. The engineers at eMagin are demonstrating emissive OLED microdisplays of similar resolution, also creating very compelling high resolution images. I know this application has been slow to take off the last few years but at this point it appears that the display devices themselves are no longer holding back the OEMs.

Also, among the numerous exhibitors showing various touchscreen products, both 3M and Touch International are demonstrating some really groundbreaking large-area projected capacitive screens. A few years ago there were only two real projected capacitive products in the marketplace and none of them supported multiple finger touch. Now, since the iPhone and new touch interface paradigms have become popular, the field has blossomed with multiple-touch solutions. Both of the offerings mentioned here provide excellent optics and virtually invisible electrodes on the glass, making them compelling for use in high-ambient luminance applications. --Stephen Atwood, Information Display

ICDM Display Measurement Standard
San Antonio, TX; June 3, 2009. The ICDM DMS is almost here. Earlier in the season, when we were organizing the display measurement sessions for the Symposium, we had some early indications that the work being conducted by the International Committee for Display Metrology (ICDM) would be released at this point in the form of the new Display Measurement Standard (DMS). Alas, that has not yet happened, but the committee has been distributing a preview guide to whet our appetites. The preview contains sample pages from the standard as well as some description of how the new standard is being constructed. It's called a standard but for those of us who linger long hours in dark rooms measuring the light emitted from our displays, it's more of a cookbook and massive problem-solving guide. The new standard will contain dramatically more content than the older Flat Panel Display Measurement (FPDM) 2.0 standard that is used extensively now and it will tackle new topics not even considered when the FPDM was published, like stereoscopic displays, for example. The Symposium session held today that focused on the ICDM work gave five of the committee sub-chairs an opportunity to present an overview of their sections of the standards and take questions from the audience, which were mostly centered around how the methods could be applied and when the DMS would be released. Well, ICDM Chair Joe Miseli promised a release by the end of the year and hinted at an August or September sneak peek. We suggest you keep checking the ICDM website to see when "almost" becomes "now"! --Stephen Atwood, Information Display

Flexible Displays
San Antonio, TX; June 3, 2009. I spent some time today chatting with Rui-Quing Ma of Universal Display Corporation about the 4-in. QVGA flexible OLED display that serves as the centerpiece of UDC's booth. After snapping some photos, I asked Ma to tell me what he considered to be the most significant aspect of this particular prototype. "What makes this display special is how close it is to mass production," he answered. "One of the samples that we're showing has been around for over a year, and it still looks great." Looking back two or three years, I have to imagine that many of the flexible demonstrators shown at SID were lucky to last through the week; that is, if they weren't changed out every night for a fresh sample. While the symposium talks and posters still have their share of lab-scale proofs of concept, it seems highly likely that at least one high-resolution flexible display will enter mass production before we gather for SID 2010 next May. Whether that first display to cross the finish line will be EPD, OLED or cholesteric, plastic or steel, LG Display or Samsung, Plastic Logic or Polymer Vision, is anyone's guess. --Robert Zehner, E Ink.