A look at future display technologies

December 28, 2009 by Dave Haynes

There’s a nice piece in Gizmodo today that helpfully brings readers up to speed with the latest state of development for OLEDs and other types of display technologies. If this is an area that interests read the whole thing. If not, here’s the upshot:

Hi-rez 3-D video for the masses is still future stuff.

LCD plants can pump out 50 inchers every 30 seconds or so, making it hard for other technologies to compete with something produced at such high volume.

OLEDs are amazing (a paper-thin, flexible display slammed by a hammer without breaking, a display that’s see-through when the power’s off, and large area OLED coating that act as a window, a wall, or a display, depending on its mode) but the manufacturing processes are still very costly, and not really there yet for mass production. That’s two year’s out, at least.

A company has a display that just uses reflective light to show monochromatic images.

HP’s information surfaces lab is working on a printer thingdoodle that imprints sheets of plastic with transistors and creates thin, flexible displays.

Very technical, but interesting stuff.

In other display news, Panasonic has completed construction of a plant in Japan that could actually produce the sort of monstrous 150 inch plasma it heaves into trade shows like CES.

Photo from Edopter