Thin TVs made with organic light-emitting diodes could become a big hit with consumers, but not any time soon, according to Toshihiro Sakamoto, president of the Panasonic AVC Networks company. “It will start to grow as a market in 2015,” he said during an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show taking place here this week. “You won’t be able to beat the cost and price performance of LCD and plasma for a long time.”
While OLED may be interesting for flexible displays, I don’t see it as a big deal for `home’ televisions.
Instead, Mitsubishi showed a laser hd-tv, which promises wider gamut, lower power requirements, and half the weight and cost of plasma/LCD screens.
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_TV).
Mitsubishi’s announcement:
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/index.jsp?epi-content=…
and some pictures:
http://gizmodo.com/342045/mitsubishi-laser-tvs-colors-look-even-jui…
Edited 2008-01-09 00:33 UTC
Well, when I first heard about OLED screens they did look very promising. It seemed to solve all the problems that LCDs had (response time, viewing angle, contrast, brightness,..) and yet be better than LCDs at what LCDs were already good (power consumption, thickness,…).
However, that was in the early 2000’s and since then LCDs have improved MUCH, while OLEDs haven’t taken off. At that time they expected OLEDs to take over LCDs in 2005-2006, and now they say in 2015. But who knows how good and cheap will LCDs be in 2015?
The lesson is that technology that works NOW is always better than a supposedly better one that will work in 3-4 years time because the former starts having users, producing money, creating an ecosystem around it, reducing costs, investing in improving its weak points, etc… and by the time the “better” one is ready, the “bad” one has already taken over the market and is very competitive in price and quality. And if it works, why change?
Name one business that’s not going to milk existing technology until it’s threatened by competition to force it to move forward?
When some makes a play and proves this guy wrong he’ll either be let go or have seen the writing and play catch up.
It’s business 101.
A television made from light emitting organisms might be better for the environment. Current televisions are built with many poisonous components that cannot be readily decomposed to something less toxic. I think that might drive consumers to purchase this type of technology.