Imagine a television set so thin that you could roll it up and carry it in your briefcase. It's not as far off as you might think.
The Sony Corp is now selling a futuristic TV in Japan that is only about 3mm thick -- that's one notch on a tailor's tape measure.
The new televisions, which began arriving in Japanese stores this month, have an 11-inch screen and cost ¥200,000 (US$1,750), said Jon Reilly, a product marketing manager at Sony Electronics.
The sets replace the bulky backlighting of typical LCD televisions with a thin film that glows with colors even when viewed from the side. In January, Sony will announce the US release date and pricing, Reilly said.
The Sony TV, called the XEL-1, owes its saturated colors and superlative slimness to the emerging technology of organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs.
OLED displays are produced not by the fluorescent bulbs of LCDs, but by organic chemicals deposited on film that shine when a current passes through them.
The Sony sets are the first mass-produced flat-panel TVs in the world to use this technology, said Paul Semenza, vice president for display research at iSuppli, a California-based market research firm. Other companies have shown prototypes of TVs. Smaller OLED panels are in use in some cellphones and portable video players.
OLEDs can produce extraordinary displays, Semenza said.
"The thinness and visual quality are stunning," he said.
NOT A THREAT
But OLEDs pose no imminent threat to the increasing popularity of LCD televisions.
"LCD manufacturers have tens of billions of dollars invested in the current process," he said, and that money can lead to LCDs with thinner profiles and crisper images that crowd out OLED competitors.
"LCDs are growing fast, and basically taking over the market," he said.
About 76 million LCD televisions will be sold worldwide this year, iSupply predicts.
By 2011, sales of 165 million LCD sets are forecast. In contrast, he said, only about 13,000 of the new OLED televisions will be sold next year.
Consumers can buy a 50-inch LCD television for roughly the same price as the much smaller Sony OLED, he said, largely because of economies of scale.
But OLEDs may gradually become more popular, said Paul Gagnon, an analyst at DisplaySearch, a market research firm in Austin, Texas. "There's speculation that beyond 2015, OLEDs could advance to become a creditable threat to the LCD flat-panel business," he said.
OLEDs have some technical advantages. LCDs typically use white light that is filtered into primary colors and remixed.
"You lose some of the breadth of the color spectrum that you see in the natural world," Semenza said of the process. "But OLEDs, depending on the materials and processes, produce highly saturated individual colors that are then combined to make this broad color spectrum and wide viewing angle."
OLEDs also have the potential to be produced cheaply.
NO BACKLIGHT
"The materials emit their own light," he said, "so you don't need the back or side lights of LCDs, or theoretically all of the color filters."
The semiconductor technology of light-emitting diodes is traditionally based on inorganic materials like silicon. In the new, parallel electronic universe of OLEDs, though, carbon-based organic materials provide the glow.
Pioneering work in the technology was done in the 1950s by Martin Pope, now an emeritus chemistry professor at New York University. Sony displayed one of the new televisions at a recent symposium in honor of his classic work.
"I was amazed," Pope said. "I couldn't believe that engineers could do that from my experiments with little jars and bottles."
Another pioneer in the field, Alan Heeger, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who with others won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2000 for work on plastics that can conduct electricity, said he was also delighted with the new TVs.
He's looking forward to yet more development, "when we can have the thin films of today on a flexible substrate" rather than the present glass substrates, so that the TVs can be rolled up and tucked into a backpack.
When that happens, pocket TVs could become as ubiquitous as PDAs.
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