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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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JUNE 8, 2004
Computing's New Screen Gems [Page 2 of 2] "IN ITS INFANCY." By that time, E Ink will be facing serious competition from alternative display technologies. Imaging heavyweight Eastman Kodak (EK ), for one, is working on making flexible displays with organic light-emitting diode technology. In OLEDs, the display is made of layers of organic material, sandwiched between special layers of plastic, which becomes luminescent when charged. That's in sharp contrast to LCDs, whose surface simply lets light shone from behind the display pass through. As a result, OLEDs offer multiple advantages over LCDs: They require a lot less power and offer better image quality. That means they're easier to view in sunlight. Flexible OLED displays could become available within two years. "Compared to LCD, OLED technology is really only in its infancy," says Dona Flamme, general manager and vice-president of the display group at Kodak. Before OLEDs can be used on a widespread basis, they need to extend their lifespans -- now hovering around 10,000 hours of operation, or some three years of TV viewing. Kodak is developing new organic materials and chemicals that make the display more durable and prevent it from interacting with water and air, which cause organic materials within the display to decompose. In some experiments, Kodak has upped the displays' lifetime by 100 times, says Flamme. SNAZZY CRTs. Kodak also is trying to iron out the wrinkles in producing larger-size OLED displays, which are difficult to make in volume. One problem is that when forming a color image, every pixel on the display has to be colored red, yellow, or blue. And that requires great precision, which is difficult and expensive to achieve in mass production. Kodak's solution: It has developed a so-called white OLED display, in which all pixels are white and where the colors are created by shining light onto the display through a color filter, which applies the right shades to the dots on the screen. That greatly simplifies manufacturing and reduces the overall device's cost, says Flamme. Plus, the device consumes less power. Moving to a new manufacturing technology is still expensive, and that's why some companies are opting for improving oldies like cathode-ray-tube (CRT) technology. Motorola has decided to do away with the electron gun, a contraption responsible for the display's bulkiness and that shoots electrons from the back of the display toward its screen. When the electrons hit phosphors coating the inside of the screen, the phosphors glow, producing an image on the screen. PUSHING LCDs. Instead, Motorola is using nanotechnology to grow, in low temperatures, clusters of tiny carbon nanotubes -- 50 times less than the width of a human hair in length -- behind every dot on the screen. Each tube acts as a little electron gun shooting to create an image. "We can grow them where we want them," says James Jaskie, chief scientist for Motorola Physical Sciences Research Laboratory in Austin. "We also grow them in clusters, for redundancy. So in case of defects, any one of the tubes can take place of another." The resulting NED (nano emissive display) screen is no more than a half-inch thick and offers image quality equal to a CRT display and often higher than a LCD's, says Jaskie. Better yet, NED displays, expected to be available from Samsung in 2006, could cost about as much as similar CRTs, he says. Now, Motorola is working on growing the nanotubes on plastic, in hopes of creating in a few years its prototype of a color flexible display. The effect of all these new technologies is that they "are making the LCD makers work harder," says analyst Jennifer Gallo of researcher IDC. Electronics maker Toshiba has been experimenting with innovative packaging that allows it to polish the glass that protects the liquid crystal to create significantly thinner and lighter displays, says Steve Vrablik, business development director for LCDs at Toshiba America Electronic Components. Other manufacturers have been tweaking the displays' chemistry and experimenting with 3-D imaging. Today, "the LCD technology is good enough for 90% of applications," says analyst Bert McComas of display consultancy DisplaySearch in Austin, Tex. "It's the various fringes of the market that are looking for differentiation." Sure, the new display technologies will start at the fringes. But they could work their way into the mainstream faster than many expect today.
 By Olga Kharif in Portland, Ore.
BW MALL
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