Display Week 2020: LG’s Future OLED Is Bendy, Flexy, See-Thru And As Big As Walls

August 6, 2020 by Dave Haynes

I am virtually wandering the exhibit hall of SID Display Week – mentally walking right on past a whole bunch of vendors that sell things like polymer microstructures and light measurement tools.

But I am stopping and looking at some of what the display guys are toting this year. A lot of it is geared to super-high refresh rate gaming monitors and to automotive dashboards and heads-up displays of the near future.

But i found this really good new video from LG Display, done for the show, which relates where it sees OLED going. It is reminiscent of those Corning Day of Glass videos from years ago.

The video (further down in this post) very gently concedes OLED had some early challenges (burn-in, operating life, price!) and that they have been overcome.

Some of the stuff is way off, high concept, but other things – like displays in auto – are already the sort of thing being shown as prototypes.

I’m intrigued by the possibilities of flexible, foldable, transparent sheets for displays, and also by the notion of OLED as the full surfaces of desks and as wall finishes. But a lot of what is shown has the pesky little capital cost thing to factor in. As much as a classroom teaching wall being all OLED is cool, I doubt there are many school districts in a position to do that – now or in the future.

On the other hand, these videos are aimed at designers and dreamers, and not at the people in Finance.

https://youtu.be/HhlMVWPj6Mw