May 2011

Our sister-site OLED-Info launched a new book today - The OLED Handbook. This is a comprehensive guide to OLED technology, market and industry. There is a growing interest in OLEDs - from all over the world, and this guide can help introduce the subject quickly and throughly.

Reading this book, you'll learn all about:

• OLED technology and materials
• What kind of OLED displays are available today
• What is a Super AMOLED and a Clear Black display
• All about OLED lighting technology
• OLED lighting panels and lamps available today
• The future of OLED displays and lighting
• And lot's more!

Polymer Vision is showing a new flexible/bendable E Ink prototype. The display offer 800x600 resolution:

The company says that you can bend this display over 25,000 times (6mm radius). We do not know if they're any closer to commercializing this. The company went bankrupt in 2009 and was later bought and now they seem back into flexible displays, and apparently still working towards a an e-reader...

Hanvon unveiled new touch technology called ERT (Electromagnetic Resonance Touch). ERT can sense both pen input and finger touch - and is placed beneath the display panel and not above it like normal touch layers. It works by adding several capacitors to a normal digitizer touch sensor.

Hanvon plans to commercialize this technology in its e-readers (for the Chinese market) by 2H 2011.

A few days ago we reported about a new color e-paper prototype by Ricoh, and now we have some more details. Ricoh used a novel method which involves stacking three layers of electrochromic panels, one on top of the other, each reflecting different colors (yellow, cyan, magenta). This can create color pixels without sub pixels. All three layers are driven by one LTPS TFT.

The display on show was 3.5" in size (113ppi) with a 27% color gamut (NTSC).

Here's a nice video with our friend Sri Peruvemba from E ink, discussing their e-paper panels and color E Ink (Triton) displays:

Sony is showing a new OTFT driven E Ink prototype. The 13.3" panel offers 1200x1600 (150ppi) resolution, 10:1 contrast ratio, 16 shades of gray and can be bent to a curvature radius of at least 5mm. Indeed had a cool demo showing how the panel bends. This panel is monochrome (they also had a color 13.3" flexible e-paper prototype on show).

Sony uses Peri-Xanthenoxanthene (PXX) for the semiconductor layer of the organic TFT (this is the same OTFT used in Sony's OLED prototype unveiled in 2010).

Bookeen is showing some real time web page scrolling on an E Ink panel:

Pretty impressive, although they've already shown us smooth video playback on such a display. Now we're waiting for their upcoming fast e-reader...

Ricoh is showing a new color e-paper prototype. The company claims that it's 2.5 times brighter than any other e-paper technology, and have a wider color range (four times wider!).

E Ink is showing some nice segmented dispaly (SURF) prototypes. I really like the surfboard concept:

Sony developed a 13.3" flexible color e-paper prototype (based on E Ink's EPD). The panel is only 150?m thick and weights 20g. The display features 800x1200 (75ppi) resolution,13% NSTC color gamut, 10% reflectance and 10:1 contrast ratio.

The prototype is made on a plastic substrate. Sony says that the key to high color gamut and reflectance was to attach a TFT substrate to an E Ink front plate with high precision (0.35?m), which reduced the margin between sub-pixels and increasing the aperture ratio of pixels. This is quite an achievement compared to the monochrome flexible prototype shown in September 2010.