Search This Blog

OLED moving beyond Phones


Today, Samsung Smartphones dominate the OLED experiences that people are enjoying around the world, but LG and Samsung are bringing that technology (pure black, low power consumption, high dynamic range) Super OLED tech to large format TV screens, laptops, desktop monitors, and other glowing rectangle displays, even some that can roll up almost like paper.

OLED, or Organic Light Emitting Diode Technology has suffered from a lot of problems, notable are the lack of brightness compared with traditional LED backlit LCD technology, limited number of usable hours (they burn out faster) and hue shifting that makes the color space look strange, with strange white balance (blueish at first). Samsung's engineering teams did a lot of work to address these problems, and by the time they introduced the Samsung Note 3 smartphone, they addressed most of them, with a screen technology that is awesome.

Lets think about the end use case for a phone screen vs a TV screen. The TV screen will likely run for hours at a time as people watch TV and Movies and play Video Games for hours at a time. By contrast, the cell phone screen is only going to come on in bursts of a few minutes at a time, in some cases tens of minutes, and in rare cases for hours, less the battery is not able to keep the phones CPU, GPU, SSD, RAM, and Screen all lit up at full tilt for hours on end. Try using Google Cardboard for example and watch the battery of your phone drain faster than ever before. With wall power, the TV screen can be unleashed from limited battery technology, and with the abundant energy from the grid, it can display images the whole family can enjoy at the same time, group movie watching is possible, and the 40+ inch flat screen HD screens common in most homes today are making the possible for families all around the world. If the OLED burns out too quickly, it will anger buyers who dropped $2000+ on their new big screen. I know that they are going to use Quantum Dots to address this problem ^^

CES 2016 showed the world a lot of new OLED screen technology, primary aimed at big screen TV products, but there are rumors and hints that Apple will bring OLED to the iPad, iPhone, MacBook, and iMac products next year, perhaps with an LG partnership for the panels. Samsung has been very shy about sharing their magical Super AMOLED+ screens with anyone. If this turns out to be true, expect next generation Apple products to have even greater battery life, the screen lighting technology is one of the biggest energy users in most HD screen based consumer electronics.

The OLED TV will save billions of kilowatt hours of power, in the evening when TV's are likely to be on. This means that more energy will be available to charge electric vehicles, ones that people park at home at night for 10hours or more every evening. This mostly only applies to people that have access to a power outlet where their car is parked at night, something that leaves many apartment and condominium dwellers out of luck for EV charging where they live, at night while they are sleeping.

Given the energy use of computer monitors today, the introduction, commercialization and mass adoption of OLED monitors will save billions more kilowatt hours of energy. This will free up even more power to charge mass transit electric vehicles like lithium ion electric busses, ferries, and light rail. Electric transportation infrastructure has a long tail pipe, one that emits pollutants far away from where most people live. At the power plant, the grid operator has the freedom to install very good effective emissions controls to keep the pollutant emissions at a minimum for every unit of power produced, and this is true even for "clean coal" power plants.




No comments:

Post a Comment