SID Says Display Week Saw Attendance Back At Pre-Pandemic Levels

SID’s Display Week is aimed more at the people engaged in R&D and manufacturing of display technology, and the engineers and related professions who design and integrate screens for everything from ad displays to digital dashboards in motor vehicles. It’s not the sort of show that an unschooled end-user – like a retailer – might get much out of, but for more technical people who want to stay on top of what’s coming, it can be super interesting.

The 60-year-old, members-based SID says last week’s show in San Jose went off quite well:

“Display Week 2022 is back to pre-pandemic level participation,” says Harit Doshi, SID’s Conventions Chair. “The show floor is packed with innovation, and exhibitors and attendees have traveled from across the world to participate. I want to congratulate all the People’s Choice award winners at Display Week 2022.”  

The show’s awards are a useful way to get a sense of new developments that raised the eyebrows of the scientists, engineers, corporate researchers, and business people who go to Display Week, in some cases choosing this over ISE (which normally runs at the start of February.

The I-Zone awards honor never-before-seen display technology shown by small companies, start-ups, and academic research laboratories. The I-Zone also offers start-up companies the opportunity to demonstrate their prototypes or other hardware demo units free of charge at the premier display exhibition in North America, and gives attendees a chance to view best-in-class emerging information display technologies in a dedicated area on the virtual show floor.

The following are the 2022 I-Zone winners:

Best Prototype
Porotech for its innovative process for achieving color tuning in one monolithic InGaN layer.

Honoree
6P Color, Inc., for its innovative algorithm to extract extended color space for multiprimary displays.

SID congratulates i-zone and people’s choice winners at Display Week 2022, for outstanding product innovation and technological advances. Check it out at https://t.co/0QyROtAbQX. #BOE #3M #CSOT #EMDGroup #UDC #Samsung #LG #Eink #DisplayWeek2022 pic.twitter.com/6Qqy596puH

— Display Week (@DisplayWeek) May 13, 2022

The People’s Choice Awards, on the other hand, put voting for the best technology, components, demonstrations, and interactive booths on the show floor in the hands of attendees.

The following are the 2022 People’s Choice Winners:

Best Technology Demonstration
BOE Technology Group Co., Ltd., for its 17.3-in. foldable OLED notebook
Mercedes-Benz for its Mercedes-Benz Experience (MBUX) Hyperscreen

Best New Display Technology:
eMagin Corporation for its direct patterned OLED – single layer with 10,000 nits
PlayNitride for its 0.49-in. full-color µ-pixeLED microLED display

Best New Display Component
Samsung Display Co.’s QD-Display

Best Large Booth
BOE Technology Group Co., Ltd.
LG Display Co., Ltd.
Samsung Display Co.
TCL China Star Optoelectronics

Best Medium Booth
PlayNitride
AUO

Best Small Booth
AGC Plasma Technology Solutions

It’s hard to get much from just the names of products and solutions, but I found press from BOE, the Chinese giant that is fairly quietly the biggest display manufacturer on the planet (they mainly white label for other consumer and pro brands). At least a couple of products are noteworthy …

BOE showed displays with mind-wobbling refresh rates – a 4K TV display with 576 Hz, and 8K TV with 576 Hz and a laptop with 500+ and a 1ms response rate. Serious gamers want 120 or 144 Hz, and super-premium gaming monitors, I think, top out at 360 Hz.

Now why you would need that level of picture quality for a commercial digital signage job, I don’t really know. But it shows how manufacturers are pushing these days more on picture quality than the old tools of bigger, brighter and skinnier.

BOE also showed what was billed as the world’s largest 95-inch 8K OLED display – “backed by the cutting-edge oxide TFT technology and white OLED vapor deposition process, the display achieves pixel-level light control and ultimate HDR image quality …”

Like I said, the SID show is for display nerds.

And BOE also showcased new or new-ish technology called Chip On Glass LED, which is distinct from the Chip On Board (or COB) that you may have come across in the last three-four years.

α-MLED represents BOE’s system-level active matrix chip-on-glass LED solution. It can deliver exquisite and ultimate image quality, giving users an immersive experience in various scenarios.

At the exhibition, BOE showcased the world’s first Mini LED product that has been put into mass production. The 86-inch 4K active matrix backlit MLED display based on glass substrates boasts an industry-leading brightness of 1,500 nits and precision light control with over 2,000 zones. So far, the display has been applied to Skyworth’s high-end TV lineup. The world’s first 0.9 mm active matrix MLED based on glass substrate boasts a peak brightness of 1,000 nits and a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1.  

What’s interesting here is the use of glass as the substrate instead of attaching the teeny LED light emitters to a printed circuit board layer. It’s also interesting that panel, because it is using miniLEDs, has more than 20,000 backlights. Older LED backlit flat panel displays might have had dozens, and they weren’t zoned.

This is a photo of that product, taken at BOE’s stand at ISE by Invidis: