Display Week: BenQ Touts Back To Back Transparent OLEDs; Use-Case Kinda Fuzzy

May 17, 2021 by Dave Haynes

The Society For Information Display’s Display Week is now live – virtual like most things, still.

It is a display nerd fest that is aimed much more at engineers than end-users, and it is a serious challenge for people like me who never even mused about a career in advanced polymers or electrical engineering.

I know enough to at least virtually walk the aisles and pick out some things here and there I understand and find interesting, but don’t ask me to explain how things work.

The event is heavy on conference and technical presentations – slide after slide of math formulae and charts – but there is also a virtual exhibit hall I am taking the afternoon (as a start) to wander around.

This is a fairly light and accessible slide from DSCC’s Business Conference … as you can see, even the business-y stuff is pretty deep.

First up, the materials division of BenQ – which has some sort of double-sided projection film that allows a pro AV design to have a pair of OLED transparent displays back to back, playing different content.

“Two different contents can be projected on a single glass at the same time with a wide viewing angle and high image quality,” says BenQ. “This new technology reduces the environmental interference from lights and hot-spot on the screen during projection. All viewers can see the excellence in image quality, color, contrast, resolution, clarity, with clarity no matter at which angle.”

Normally with a transparent OLED, which is self-emissive and doesn’t have a backlight, seeing the screen content on one side means on the back side it would be the same content, but reversed.

The demo video suggests there is a substantial sheet of glass or plastic in between the two back to back OLEDs, which maybe (see my earlier qualifier about my absence of engineering cred) kills the reverse image from being visible from the back-end.

The use-case suggested here is two gamers who could play a head to head match and stare each other down through the OLED sheets.

Big hmmmm on that. That’s a tiny niche for what is already a very niche product. Transparent OLEDs have a lot of zeroes in the retail price, so the gamers may have to be sports stars who don’t look at trivial things like prices.

I’m not sure how else this might be used.

BenQ is also touting an optical film that can b applied to mini and microLED to enhance contrast levels, and a film that reduces eye strain for wide angle views and reflection.