Sony Razor Thin Flexible Display Foreshadows Unbreakable Laptop Screen?

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Sony recently showed off a 0.01-inch thick organic electroluminescent display on its website that will be presented and discussed at an academic symposium in Long Beach, California this week. Could this type of display be used in laptops of the future?

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Check out the video above of this 2.5-inch flexible display from Sony that combines organic thin film transistor technology with organic electroluminescent display technology. Other than being very, very cool a few things come to mind in how practical this type of display could be for laptops:

• It's obviously very light and would greatly help in cutting the weight of the system down
  
  
• It won't break if you drop your laptop! An LCD screen on today's laptops easily break during a drop situation and to replace an LCD costs at least $400, but usually more
  
  
• You can see in the video that the viewing angles for this screen are excellent, there's no distortion of colors as angles change

Don't go getting too excited though, this working display is 2.5 inches diagonally in size and there's currently limitations as to how large Sony can make the display. Furthermore the cost of this technology, though not disclosed, is said to be very high at the present time (as anything in the lab phase usually is). All the same, the possibility of razor thin, feather light, unbreakable laptop displays is rather tantalizing.

 

This is an amazing technology, many things can be done in the lab, but I wonder when are we going to see it in a laptop for a reasonable price.

I hope someday we will see a 15" "foldable laptop" that can be put in a pocket.

 

Wow, the future looks very exciting. I'm sure these screens will make their way into portables soon enough - maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day

 

Awesome! Can't wait for it!

 

although probably would be very expensive, but for the screen size what about in a mobile phone or a palm pilot pocket pc type thing. or even mp3/video player.

i've had problems with breaking screens on phones and on my ipod, plus its so flexible.

 

Oh yeah, been there with the broken lcd before...

 

One word: ouch.

 

i'm guessing sony will make an even thinner sony ericson phone?

that looked kinda a cool

 

Well.. you can always download the broken lcd screen wallpaper..

 

I wouldn't have thought these would be applied into notebooks.
I would expect them to be applied in possibly newspapers at first, or those digital book readers.
When mass produced, I expect they would be cheap enough for throw-away use.

Even if used in in small devices, it would still probably need a hard front covering, which could break, but would be neccessary in order to protect the screen from sharp objects, like a key.

 

I dont think newspapers or digital book readers will ever be implemented with this stuff unless it is very cheap. Maybe as a prototype just to show that it can be done. No one will be willing to pay for it.

It will first come to small gadgets such as PDAs and high end phones because there people might be willing to spend $200 more to get something thinner and smaller. The pictuer doesnt look very clean yet. Many stripes and not high res. so it will take a while longer before it comes to notebooks.

 

All this portable screen tech in whichever variety are years away from being affordable (to the mass consumer as much as anything)

I look forward to the day when I can have my sig on my shirt (not accounting for tackiness and bad taste! )

Nah, much better is applications such as downloading news, magazines, books, internet pages to peruse etc.

 

well everything i quite high price at the beginning and this seems like no exception
SSDs were the same too when they first came out but they are making their way into the notebook market...but slowly but eventually will replace hdds at some point in the future

 

Saw this on youtube a couple days ago. Amazing stuff! I wonder if it is a lot cheaper to make?

 

this technology has actually been around for a couple decades if i recall corre ctly, but never advanced far enough to be commercialized until a few years ago.
a few lg's, samsung and nokia cellphones already utilize monochrome oled's in their external displays. also, sony uses them in their mp3 players and cellphones.
once they become mass produced you'll see them embedded in everything from posters, your car's windshield, cellphones, your tv set, remote controls, pda's, computer monitors, medical equipment, clothing, and it will play a large part in replacing traditional paper.
i can't wait to see the unique form factors that become possible with bendable displays.
imagine cellphones that look like a simple wrist band. or tv sets that literally "hang" off your wall, or can be rolled up when you're not using it. or imagine your gps system utilizing the oled screen in your windshield to direct you. or credit card sized displays/computers, that can simply be left in your wallet. i wish i could travel 5 years into the future.....*sob*.

 

OLED screens have amazing contrast ratio but their downside is their limited lamplife compared to conventional LCD displays.

 

Sony already released a PDA with a colour OLED display years ago (google "Sony CLIE VZ90"). The screen is truly amazing, it's too bad that the technology wasn't mainstream.

 

if im not mistaken the zen micro MP3 player sports an OLED screen
whereas the ipod counterparts sport LED screens

 

Haha, yeah, my thought too after it happened... This happened in March, and it was an old P3 lattitude with 256mb of ram, so it was no great loss... Shouldda seen the fall, everyone in the pit areas near me like gasped all at the same time, lol. My friends all went up with their cameras and took pics of it...one of which set it as his wallpaper.. It was cool too cause if you pressed on it in certain areas, you could make it like go all black on one half of the screen...

 

Is that your room?? It look just as messy as mine haha cheers to us, for living like a slob

 

i compeletly forgot about that. also, kodak had a digicam with an oled screen. philips had a few products, and sanyo played a big role in development as well.

 

Very impressive technology! Unfortunately it seems Sony hasn't worked out all the problems yet either. Take a close look to see the lines and display screen errors. They tried and it's a good demonstration, but it looks like it's got some pretty difficult quality control issues to overcome. This is definitely the way of the future though.

 

My room is probably as messy, but it's not my room. It's in the main gym/arena of the San Jose State University during this year's 2007 F.I.R.S.T. robotics competition. My team and I were there all the way from Alaska this year. That was my laptop I brought down with me to display a video I put together, (which flat-out OWNED by the way...) And on the last day of the competition, it fell and shattered the lcd...

 

looks like LG and Philips have already annoouced something similar a week or two before, found these on a korean news website

http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200705/200705180014.html

http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200705/200705140010.html

 

OLED is already in comsumer products, and its supposed to be cheap to make aswell but since its not mainstream or mass produced it has a high premium.

It can do alwsome things like the OP showed. Problem is that OLED stands for Organic - LED it uses living material that produces a color when a electrical current goes thru it. Anything organic has a life and death cycle...

of the 3 main colors RGB... the material they use for blue has a significatly shorter life span than the Red and Green. Thats been the big battle for mainstream OLED production for a color display device for a few years now.

Also they degrade over time, as the material slowly decomposes it loses some of its color quality and becomes like a yellow tint.

They had suspected back when this was first hitting big news sites that 2 years would be the average life of a display built on OLED tech before it had to be replaced, but were getting further with the tech at a good level. It should have come along a good bit by now, as I learned of all this about a year ago.

OLED is already on cell phones and things like that, MP3 players ect.