Sony Develops Film-Thin Display
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TOKYO -- In the race for ever thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all _ a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-color video.
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By Yuri Kageyama Associated Press  TOKYO -- In the race for ever-thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all -- a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full- color video.  Sony Corp.
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Imagine sitting down to your computer and seeing thin, plastic color displays on either side of your monitor, showing high-resolution text pages you can refer to and print from. On the wall next to you is another large display on which you can show colleagues a power point presentation, or display family photos and notes.
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MANHASSET, NY - Sony Corp. is considering leaving the plasma display market to focus on flat-panel liquid crystal (LCD) displays, according to several online reports.
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Sony is dropping its money-losing rear-projection TV business to focus on two flat panel technologies -- liquid crystal display and organic light-emitting diode.
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Japanese consumer electronics maker Sony  Corp (6758.T) said on Tuesday it will spend 22 billion yen  ($203.5 million) to develop technology to make medium to large  organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels.
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(InfoWorld) - Samsung Electronics has developed what it claims is the thinnest LCD (liquid crystal display) panel, just the thickness of a credit card, designed for use in mobile phones. The screen measures 0.82 millimeters thick and, combined with a new method for attaching the panel to devices, will allow manufacturers to shave between 1.4 mm and 2.4mm off the thickness of their phones, Samsung said. The size reduction comes partly from a new assembly technology developed by Samsung called i-Lens. Most phone screens use a piece of reinforced plastic that sits a few millimeters above the LCD to protect it. With iLens, Samsung found a way to attach a protective sheet directly onto the display in a way that also improves its shock resistance and readability. The technique makes the display easier to read outdoors because it eliminates the reflection that occurs on the plastic sheet used in existing designs, Samsung said. The screens will be available in 2.1 inch and 2.2 inch diagonal sizes. They offer 240 x 320-pixel resolution and 500:1 contrast ratio. Samsung expects to be mass producing them by the second half of next year. Since the popularity of Motorola's very thin phones, including the Razr, phone makers are increasingly trying to make thinner phones. The Razr flip phone is 13.9 mm thick.
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CHIBA, Japan  - Canon 7751.T and Toshiba   6502.T said on Tuesday they would start mass production of   ultra-thin flat-panel TVs in early 2008, entering a market   dominated by makers such as Matsushita Electric Industrial   6752.T and Samsung Eletronics 005930.KS.
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In the race for ever thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all &#151; a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-color video.
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Two of the world's biggest flat-panel display makers unveiled flexible full-color displays this week.
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Showcased at the Mobile Displays Conference this week in San Diego, LG.Philips LCD's screens for mobile devices are designed to be compact and efficient.
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South Korean display screen maker Samsung  SDI Co  said on Thursday it had developed a 31-inch  ultra-thin organic screen, raising the stakes in an  accelerating worldwide race for organic displays.
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(InfoWorld) - Fujitsu has made progress in its development of flexible, paper-thin displays that consume very little power. The company unveiled its latest prototype on Tuesday, a 7.8-inch panel that can display up to 4,096 colors. The display, which is the same size as a sheet of A5 paper, was built into a thin case in the form of an electronic book reader. It was on display at the Ceatec show, which opened on Tuesday. The e-book reader was rigid, but the flexibility of the displays could offer an advantage in other types of applications. Fujitsu offered the example of an electronic advertising panel that could curve around the top of a train or subway car. The display area of the prototype shown at Ceatec was about four times as large as that ofÂ another prototype Fujitsu showedÂ in the middle of last year. The e-book reader was deceptively light, weighing only 180 grams -- much less than many visitors to Fujitsu's booth expected before they took it in their hands. Its light weight comes largely from the use of a plastic substrate for the display, rather than a glass substrate like those used for LCD (liquid crystal display) panels. Pages could be turned with the push of a button. The screen refreshes in several sweeps, from left to right, and the time taken to redraw the image depends on its complexity and the number of colors, said Fumiyuki Hashimoto, a Fujitsu spokesman. A complex image takes around 4 seconds to refresh, while a simpler, eight-color image can be drawn in about a second, he said. The prototype e-book reader included a USB-connector and an SD memory card slot. Fujitsu is still developing the display and doesn't have any commercialization plans at present. The prototype has one other major advantage over existing panels -- it doesn't require constant power to keep the image on the display. That means portable products can be made to have a much longer battery life.
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New technologies like OLED make possible thinner, lighter displays that use less energy.
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(InfoWorld) - The experience of watching television or video clips on mobile phones may improve with a new screen being developed by LG.Philips LCD Co. The company has developed a new TFT-LCD (thin-film transistor-liquid crystal display) panel for mobile phones that has better response times than similar screens in use today, it announced Thursday. Faster response times help to eliminate the after-images and ghosting that can appear on LCD screens, leading to sharper, better quality video. The 2-inch display has a 16 millisecond response time, compared to 25 milliseconds for today's typical phone screen, LG.Philips said. The screen will be ideal for phones that can receive TV broadcasts or connect to broadband wireless networks for downloading videos. LG.Philips developed a different technology from that used in its notebook PC panels, to meet the power consumption demands of mobile phones. LG.Philips expects to start mass producing the new display this year. It came out of a new unit the company launched in January to develop smaller displays. That unit is now working on a display that uses IPS (in-plane switching), a technology typically used in larger displays that increases the viewing angle. Mobile phones need to be increasingly capable as operators upgrade their networks to offer higher-speed connections. The new services create a need for better screens, faster chips and more memory capacity. Just last week Samsung Electronics Co.Â said it had developed a new technology toÂ make screens on handheld devices brighter, even in broad daylight. It measures the ambient light available and adjusts the brightness of the screen accordingly. The technology is expected in handsets later this year. Â
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(InfoWorld) - Konica MinoltaÂ  is developing a lightweight, holographicÂ wearable display, aÂ  prototype of which was on display this week at the Ceatec exhibition in Chiba, Japan. The Holographic See-Through Browser prototype resembles a pair of eyeglasses and uses a prism with a thickness of 3.5 millimeters and a holographic element to reduce the weight of the display to 27 grams. Konica Minolta has just begun development of the lightweight display and is looking for an application where the device could be useful, said Hiroshi Itou, an assistant manager at the business development group of Konica Minolta Technology Center Inc. Possible applications under consideration include giving workers access to an instruction manual or allowing commuters to watch a video while riding a train, he said. In a video demonstration of the technology, Konica Minolta showed how a user could watch a motorcycle race on the display while walking around their house. In this demonstration, the see-through image of the game appeared to be float in the user's line of sight. The display image is produced by a small attachment above the glasses, which contains an LED (light-emitting diode) that projects the image through a condenser lens and a prism. Once the image travels through the prism, it passes through the display where it is projected onto the holographic element. The display attachment on the glasses is connected by a cable that leads to a small, wearable device.
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Emerging LED technology will boost the colors in a flat-panel display.