LCD & LED @ SID
By Scott Wilkinson May 27, 2005 — At the Society for Information Display (SID) 2005 International Symposium, Seminar, and Exhibition this week in Boston, MA, Samsung is highlighting a number of important developments. Their 82-inch LCD panel, the largest in the world, is being exhibited for the first time in the Americas. The prototype is said to have a horizontal and vertical viewing angle of 180º, reproduce 92% of the NTSC color gamut, and exhibit a response time of 8ms or less.

A new 46-inch LED backlight unit uses the company's Xmitter optical technology, which is said to increase light usage efficiency by more than 40% over the commonly used side-scan method while consuming 40% less power compared with existing LED products. It also reproduces 107% of the NTSC gamut and generates a brightness of 500 nits.

Perhaps the most interesting demonstration is a 40-inch amorphous-silicon (a-Si), active-matrix (AM) organic LED (OLED) prototype, said to be the world's largest single-sheet glass-plate OLED display. With a resolution of 1280x800, the new prototype claims all the traditional features of emissive OLED technology—wide viewing angle, thin package size, no color filter, and no backlight—with the production advantages of standard a-Si techniques. To date, most AM OLED prototypes have used costly polysilicon approaches, which have limited production sizes.

The new prototype is said to offer a maximum screen brightness of 600 nits, a peak contrast ratio of 5000:1, and 80 percent of the NTSC color gamut. The company expects that the ultra-thin profile will allow future TV designers to create televisions with a total thickness of 3cm or less.

In other SID news, OSRAM Opto Semiconductors is demonstrating an LED backlight module suitable for an 82-inch LCD panel. (I was unable to determine if the Samsung 82-incher uses this module; I tend to think not.) The size of a standard door and only 40mm deep, the module includes 280 red, 560 green, and 280 blue next-generation LEDs, which deliver 150% of the NTSC color gamut and a brightness of 10,000 nits while consuming only 1100 watts. Clearly, the flat-panel revolution is just getting started, with big things ahead for all home theater buffs to enjoy.