Kodak orders OLED panels for digital photo frames

Kodak has opted to use Chi Mei EL OLED displays in their digital photo frames.

In fact, the 7.6-inch OLED displays, made by CMEL, which is owned by the standard LCD maker Chi Mei Optoelectronics, will begin to enter production in September.

This should provide plenty of time for the completed displays to be delivered to Kodak and to prep for the much anticipated holiday season.

And even though digital photo frames run the gamut of price ranges, these OLED offerings are thought to be quite pricey.

Chi Mei EL digital photo frames Kodak oled

40 Inch Panasonic OLED TV By 2011?

While the OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) revolution continues to hot up, it has been announced that Panasonic expects to be in a position to market its first 40 inch OLED TV in 2011. This is a step up from the original target of a 37 inch TV in the same timescale but one which has caught the eye of many OLED enthusiasts.

For those not aware of the OLED revolution, this is a new style of lighting system which is both organic, easier to manage, creates a better TV picture and uses a fraction of the power that systems of today use. There had been initial problems with the quality of the TV picture which added to the stop start stop start revolution that first came to the fore in the late 1990s.

However, the last 12 months has seen a number of major breakthroughs with the likes of Sony and Panasonic leading the way in the TV market. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg as OLED technology has the potential to change the whole electronic industry landscape. The leaders in the sector have been quick to appreciate the potential for the immediate future and literally billions of dollars of investment is pouring into the sector.

Breakthrough Yields Brighter OLEDs, Could Be Used For Lighting

New competitor may enter the lighting fray thanks to new research

The future of LED lighting is looking bright. Endorsed by a $20M USD U.S. Department of Energy "L Prize", commercial powers and startups alike are eying LED lighting as a replacement for the decrepit incandescent light bulb technology, which is only 10 percent efficient and has remained almost unchanged for over half a century. Recent breakthroughs, which may allow LEDs of all kinds to be processed on silicon wafers, may help to bring down costs.

One player that remained largely unconsidered in the LED v. fluorescent/incandescent battle was LED's organic brethren: OLEDs. OLEDs have many advantages over LEDs -- the ability to flex, improved color, and the potential to be manufactured by cheaper organic ink printing processes. However, they also have a couple key disadvantages. One, lifetime, has been steadily chipped away, and with the first generation of OLED TV displays, the problem has become almost a nonissue. However, one key obstacle to OLED lighting remained -- brightness.

Typically with OLEDs, only 20 percent of the light generated by the device is emitted. This makes there brightness inferior to LEDs, making them a poor choice for lighting. However, in a significant breakthrough, researchers at the University of Michigan and Princeton University have developed an OLED/microlense combination material that boosts illumination by over 60 percent, bringing it into the realm of respectability.

The research was led by Stephen Forrest, a professor of electrical engineering and physics at Michigan, and Yuri Sun, from Princeton University. The pair observed that in OLEDs light is generated by applying electricity to a thin organic layer, analogous to the semiconductor in an LED. However in OLEDs the material character internally reflects the light, forcing it to run parallel, instead of perpendicularly out of the bulb.

To get the light to come out, researchers first use an organic grid meshed into the material. The light is guided by this grid to 5 micrometer domed microlenses, which focus it and project it out as rays.

The results are respectable. The researchers reported that the device produced 70 lumens per watt, compared with 15 lumens per watt for incandescent lighting, and 90 lumens per watt for fluorescent lighting. While it might seem that fluorescent beats the new OLEDs, fluorescent has other problems -- harsh light, less longevity, and the use of environment-damaging substances like mercury.

The team plans to next scale the technology to more efficient OLED designs. They are confident the process can be affordably adopted for mass commercial production.

The DOE is curious about the new technology, seeing as a way to possibly more affordably reach its LED adoption goals. If LEDs are widely adopted, according to the DOE, U.S. energy consumption for lighting could be cut to a third of current levels, resulting in a 10 percent total reduction in power use and a 258 million metric ton reduction in carbon emissions.

As both LED and OLED technologies are rapidly advancing in terms of production and efficiencies, it remains to be seen which will ultimately prove themselves the eventual victor via performance and cost. However, in Professor Forrest's eyes, the future of OLEDs has never looked better. He is confident that OLEDs will thrive, and that his team's breakthrough will aid in that success. He states optimistically, "Luckily, OLEDs are the light that just keeps giving. There is so much to be done and so much that's been done, but this is nonetheless a quite exciting advancement."

OLED-based Optimus Maximus Keyboard

Despite its innovative approach to keyboard design, the OLED-based Optimus Maximus keyboard is best considered an expensive novelty. Its $1,600 price tag keeps it out of the hands of the average consumer, and we also question the practical benefit of using 113 customizable OLED screens as an input device. There is something undoubtedly unique and appealing about the degree to which the Optimus Maximus gives you complete control over its keys' appearance. But even for gamers, designers, and others who tend to demand more from their input hardware, the Optimus Maximus offers insufficient utility to justify its high price.

The Optimus Maximus is a product of the Art. Lebedev Studio, a design firm in Russia. To purchase a board you can order directly from the Art. Lebedev store, or you can refer to one of five U.S.-based retailers listed on the Art. Lebedev Web site, of which ThinkGeek is perhaps the best known. Ordering from the Art. Lebedev Studio appears to be the most expensive option, presumably because your order will come from Russia directly, rather than through a U.S. distributor.

Physically, the Optimus Maximus is a bit clunkier than a standard keyboard. Its 6.75-inch depth and 1.25-inch height isn't that extraordinary, but at 21.25 inches wide, the Optimus Maximus is only one quarter of an inch less broad than Logitech's older G15 gaming keyboard, which is the widest modern keyboard we're aware of.

The Logitech board crams in 125 keys compared with the Optimus Maximus and its 113 keys. Considering that each key is in fact a small OLED display wrapped in a transparent plastic enclosure, it's perhaps easy to understand why the Optimus Maximus has a less efficient key density-to-width ratio. If the tiny screens were any smaller you'd lose visibility, and the plastic surrounding each display must be thick and durable enough to offer adequate protection. The keys are also removable, which makes for easy cleaning and replacement, but which also requires sturdy construction so that the connective parts hold up. The unfortunate side effect of such bulky keys is that the Optimus Maximus is terrible for touch-typing. The tightly packed keys make for lots of mistaken presses, and the mushy responsiveness slows down your words per minute.


Clunky plastic keys impede fast typing.

The hallmark of the Optimus Maximus is that its software lets you customize the image on each tiny display. The default layout provides a standard alphanumeric layout, but through the downloadable configuration software you can change the color, font, and size of the letters. You can alter the background color, you can type words, reassign commands, and even tie image and video files to display on individual keys, or across multiple keys.

Open up an image-editing program through the configurator and you can draw freehand over an image of the keyboard layout. Whatever you care to draw on top of that layout will appear on the keyboard as soon as you save your new file. You can assign different layouts to appear on the keyboard when you open a specific application or with a certain key command. The software also comes with media controls, Gmail notification, and CPU performance presets to assign out, among others.

As the Optimus Maximus works with both Windows PCs and Macs, it will recognize each operating system automatically and load up the familiar Windows icon and Apple command keys by default, depending on the system. The default settings reside on an included 512MB SD Card, and you'll find an SD Card slot on the back of the keyboard. This lets you save custom layouts and bring them with you if you move the Optimus Maximus between different computers.


The SD Card slot on the back lets you take your custom layouts on the road.

As technically impressive as these capabilities might be, it's hard for us to imagine who might truly need them. Gamers, Web developers, and professional digital image or video editors might seem like natural customers. However, given the level of familiarity most of those kinds of users tend to have with their computing hardware, it's the configurability rather than the visual reminder afforded by the Optimus Maximus's OLED keys that's most important. Much more affordable, mechanical keyboards from Logitech, Razer, and others offer similar customization flexibility through dedicated hot keys, macro programming, and even keys you can physically remove and rearrange in the case of the Razer Tarantula.

We can't say that the capability to alter your keys' appearance is a negative, and it's hard to deny that the Optimus Maximus has a very high novelty factor. Custom visuals on a keyboard are at worst harmless, and we can picture plenty of scenarios where they might be relatively useful, from teaching someone how to use a program, to switching between control schemes for different applications, to driving a home theater PC. The problem is that its $1,600 price tag is so far out of whack with the other keyboards on the market, that we simply don't find what the Optimus Maximus has to offer enough of a benefit to offset its cost.


Reviewed by: Rich Brown

Institutes join forces for oled production

organic led, oled, roll to roll production The Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Electron Beam and Plasma Technology (FEP) have joined forces to develop process technology for roll to roll production of organic devices.
Fraunhofer has already established the Centre for Organic Materials and Electronic Devices Dresden (COMEDD) and the cooperation of the two Fraunhofer institutes is said to be a ‘significant milestone’ for COMEDD. The roll to roll equipment is located at the Fraunhofer FEP and used by both institutes.




“This plant is among the first types worldwide to develop and produce OLED (organic light-emitting diodes) lighting modules and organic solar cells,” said FEP director Professor Volker Kirchhoff. “This is an important step in the development of industrial scale manufacturing processes and the strategic cooperation enables a perfect combination of the competencies in the field of coating and device technology.”
Professor Karl Leo, director of Fraunhofer IPMS, added: “The new coating plant will enhance Dresden's standing as a cluster location for organic semiconductors and we should see the first oled demonstrators in early 2009.”

Sony ''awfully close'' to selling a 27-inch OLED TV

Sony is currently selling an 11 inch OLED TV (XEL-1) for about $2,500. This TV is more like an expensive executive desk decoration than a home entertainment product. Sony's COO Stan Glasgow said this week at a dinner event in San Francisco that Sony is "awfully close" to selling a 27" OLED TV.

What "awfully close" means in terms of time frames can only be guessed. I assume though that Sony will try to sell a 27 inch OLED TV this holiday shopping season, at least in Japan.

The biggest problem in producing OLED TVs lies in the amount of manual labor needed according to Sony. After the 27 inch OLED Sony plans to offer a 40 inch OLED TV.

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E-paper and OLEDs

LG e-paper



E-paper can also bend like the newest OLED and LCD displays, but is much more energy efficient as it is a bistable (only uses power when changing the image) system that does not require a backlight. Readable in any light regular paper is, e-paper promises to create a new means of accessing information that will challenge traditional paper media. This e-paper display (EPD) from LG Display uses e-ink core tech and LG driver and backplane technology.

e-ink tablet development kit



Here's an e-paper electronic notepad development kit from E-Ink. That means there will be a bunch of devices with e-paper pads just around the corner. This kit contains everything an engineer needs to integrate a daylight-visible bistable rewritable electronic sketch pad into their designs.

UDC OLED




There must have been a rule at the show for every vendor to have at least one flexible (or at least bendy) display at their booth. This prototype media player with curved OLED display was a joint venture between Universal Display and LG Display. Due to their high brightness and contrast, OLED displays will dominate high-performance portable device applications. (That market niche is also very forgiving of OLED's aging issues, as a portable device's lifetime is significantly shorter than a traditional home display product.

samsung pad

As we pointed out, OLED's thin profile, high brightness, color saturation, and contrast make it a very good display for small-form-factor devices and interesting configurations. This OLED notepad concept piece from Samsung SDI had a lot of people drooling.

kodak OLED

One of the issues of OLEDs is their sensitivity to oxygen and moisture, resulting in color shift as the phosphor degrades over time. One way to get around that is to use the OLED as backlight. A white OLED BLU-driven display will not have the color-shift issues of an RGB OLED, but still be extremely thin with excellent color saturation due to the higher quality of white light provided by the OLED. This prototype from Kodak uses an OLED BLU with advanced color filter technology.

samsung OLED



Even though aging issues make larger OLED displays problematic, that doesn't mean that there aren't any large OLEDs around. This collection of 32-inch OLED displays from Samsung SDI shows that large OLEDs are not just one-off samples, but are truly on a commercialization process that will result in a finished product.


-Alix Paultre
Ecnmag.com