The Society for Information Display presented the first Display of the Year Awards (DYAs) for 1995. Initially, the awards were given in two categories: Display of the Year and Display Product of the Year. The Display of the Year category honors developments in display technology demonstrating novel and outstanding features such as new physical or chemical effects, or a new addressing method. The Display Product of the Year category recognizes products that incorporate displays in ways that enhance or make possible the product's appeal, performance, and utility, where the display itself is not necessarily a new device. For the 1998 awards, the category of Display Material or Component of the Year was added to acknowledge materials or components that are used in displays or display systems to enhance the performance of the display.

Winners are selected by the DYA Committee, which consists of distinguished display technologists and technological journalists from all over the world. The DYAs are presented each year at SID's International Symposium, Seminar & Exhibition.

1995

Display of the Year Awards

Display of the Year: Texas Instruments' Digital Light Processing (DLP) Engine. Incorporating TI's Digital Micromirror Device (DMD™), this unique approach used individual hinged micromirrors fabricated on a MOS IC that contained the drivers for the mirrors. Each mirror represented a pixel, which was turned on and off depending on whether the mirror was tilted so that the light it reflected was directed through a lens onto a screen or out of the lens' range. TI's unique approach to the challenges of projection-display technology was marked by technical innovation, a long-term commitment to working out the engineering details, and a clear and consistent business model based on Canon's success in building laser-printer engines that OEMs incorporated into end-user projection products.

Honorable Mention: Fujitsu's 21-in. Color Plasma Display. Fujitsu was the first company to bring a "full-color" plasma display to market, and the company's model FPF21C8060UA was, in 1995, the only the only commercial "full-color" (262,000 colors) PDP. Upon Fujitsu's receipt of the 1995 honorable mention, the awards committee noted the company's PDP was "clearly the first of many commercial large-screen color PDPs" and that these panels would "dramatically alter the face of entertainment, computation, presentation, industrial control, and communications products by making direct-view large-screen color displays practical."

Display Product of the Year Awards

Display Product of the Year: Casio's QV-10 LCD Digital Camera was the first digital still-image camera to be enhanced with a liquid-crystal display (LCD) The camera weighed 6.7 ounces (plus the weight of four AA batteries), stored up to 96 JPEG images and featured a 1.8-in. TFT active-matrix LCD for use as both a viewfinder and playback monitor. With the camera in record mode, the LCD monitor allowed the viewer to look at the image on the viewfinder and adjust the exposure interactively.

The camera could send its images in NTSC video format directly to a video tape deck, a standard television set equipped with a video-input jack, a picture phone, or a video printer. With an optional personal-computer adapter kit, the images could be uploaded to a Windows-based PC or Macintosh computer for storage, manipulation and/or printing. The edited images were then capable of being transferred back to the camera. In play mode, four or nine images could be displayed on a single screen, and users could enlarge selected portions of a single image.

By incorporating a color display, Casio transformed the general-purpose digital still camera into a tool of vastly expanded uses, pricing it at under $1,000 to make it possible for many consumers to explore those uses.

Honorable Mention: Sharp's Hi-8 Viewcam. Following the company's own lead in creating compact consumer camcorders using a relatively large color LCD as a combination viewfinder and playback monitor, Sharp created the VL-H420UP viewcam for professional applications. The unit used a 4-in.-diagonal LCD with enhanced resolution and a reflectivity of only 1% for better contrast and viewability in brightly lit conditions. The Viewcam offered a 16:9 wide-screen mode, digital image stabilization, fade-in/fade-out capability, a high-speed motorized zoom that went from full wide angle to full telephoto in 2 seconds, and an instantaneous 20X digital zoom.

1996

Display of the Year Awards

Display of the Year: Hitachi's 13.3-in. Super TFT-LCD with In-Plane Switching. Although other companies followed in its footsteps, Hitachi was the first to utilize in-plane switching (IPS) in a practical display. In doing so, Hitachi created a true desktop replacement for cathode-ray tubes (CRTs), with large horizontal and vertical viewing angles and with no color change at any viewing angle. IPS, which Hitachi called "Super TFT," made a major change in the TFT-LCD panel architecture. Traditional TFT-LCDs had had electrodes on the front and backplates, and applying a voltage to these electrodes tiled the liquid-crystal molecules from the plane of the plates to a plane that was perpendicular to the plates. This turned the LCD pixel from OFF to ON, but did so in such a way that the optical characteristics could vary greatly with angle. Super-TFT put both electrodes on the bottom plate so that when the liquid-crystal molecules were twisted from the OFF to the ON state, they were always oriented parallel to the bottom plate, resulting in optical characteristics that were remarkably constant with viewing angle.

The process for implementing this new architecture was simpler than the traditional one. The only tradeoff arose from the fact that the Super-TFT approach put opaque metal electrodes on the bottom plate. The result was a somewhat smaller aperture ratio, so Super-TFTs were not suitable for battery-operated applications.

Honorable Mention: PixTech's () 52-in. Field-Emission Display (FED) was the first commercially available FED. The ¼-VGA monochrome display came in a 70-nit 1-W (typical) version with a green phosphor, and had horizontal and vertical viewing angles of 160°. PixTech opened the door for manufacturers of FEDs, and with its PixTech Alliance invited other companies - including Futaba, Raytheon and Motorola - to walk through that door with them.

1997

Display of the Year Awards

Display of the Year Award: Jointly awarded to Fujitsu and NEC for their 42-in. Color Plasma Display Panels. Fujitsu Ltd. was first with its 42-in. PDPs and dominated the still-small market in 1997. NEC Corp., another Japanese company, had also made strides in the market by 1997, and showed an impressive panel at SID '97 in Boston. Fujitsu and NEC were the only two companies to have PDPs commercially available before the cutoff date for the 1997 DYAs, and the awards committee chose to honor both companies for their achievements and the industry as a whole for its farsighted commitment to plasma technology.

Honorable Mention: Sony's Super-Flat FD Trinitron® CRTs caused a stir at SID '97 with their 16:9 aspect ratios, beautiful CRT images, and completely flat screens. Flat-screen CRTs had been produced in the past in small quantities by Tektronix for military and government customers, and by Zenith in somewhat larger quantities for premium computer monitors. But Sony was the first to produce a large wide-aspect-ratio flat-screen for television and the first to use Trinitron® taut-wire technology in a flat-screen CRT. The result was a striking difference in what viewers saw when they watched a CRT-based television receiver. Sony used the designation WEGA for Japanese-market receivers based on the FD Trinitron®.

Display Product of the Year Awards

Display Product of the Year: Clarity Visual Systems' LCD Rear-Projection Point-of-Purchase Displays showed the company could apply rear-projection LCD technology to a specialized but large market and optimize it for videowall, kiosk, and dynamic-signage applications. Units had viewing areas ranging from 40 to 58 in. on the diagonal, depths starting at 18 in., weights beginning at 90 lbs., and an average white luminance greater than 200 fL.

Clarity's models were designed to be used singly, arrayed horizontally in "banners," vertically in posts, and both horizontally and vertically in video walls. Design goals included even luminosity across each screen, excellent consistency of luminance and color from unit to unit to enhance videowall-type applications, and easy accessibility and set-up. Clarity impressed the 1997 awards committee with its ability to focus on a class of customers and their needs and to tailor display system integration and development efforts to specifically answer those needs.

1998

Display of the Year Awards

Gold Award: Tohoku Pioneer's Organic Electroluminescent Display. Tohoku Pioneer produced a production version of its 256x64 dot-matrix OLED device and incorporated it into Pioneer's GD-F1 FM Multiplex Automotive Receiver for receiving text messages from the FISC traffic-information system. The OLED's high luminance and contrast made the messages readable in most daylight conditions. This green device was the world's first and only commercially produced OLED. In presenting Tohoku Pioneer with the 1998 Gold Award, the DYA committee acknowledged Tohoku and Pioneer's solution of the many technological problems that stood between a promising electro-optical material and practical display devices.

Silver Award: Fujitsu's 15-in. Multi-Domain Vertical Alignment (MVA) TFT LCD. With its FLC38XGC6V/6V-01 module, Fujitsu combined a novel LC mode with a multi-domain structure for a combination of wide angle (160° both horizontally and vertically) and very fast switching time (25 ms, on + off) based on the structure of the display itself, i.e. without external compensation. In addition, the multiple domains were created without rubbing.

Fujitsu exhibited a 21.3-in. demonstration unit in Japan, which was shown displaying a motion picture, suggesting the possibility of a wall-hanging TV. But in 1998, the awards committee found the 15-in. MVA-TFT module, which was being delivered at a rate of several thousand a month, the most exciting development. With a luminance of 200 cd/m², a contrast ratio of 300:1, a four-tube backlight, and a choice of an LVDS or CMOS digital interface, the committee deemed this display a particularly attractive CRT replacement for monitors.

Display Product of the Year Award

Gold Award: Hughes-JVC's D-ILA™ Digital Graphics G1000 Projector incorporated their recently developed Direct-Drive Image Light Amplifier (D-ILA™) in the first projector to use the highly effective reflective light-valve technology. Unlike the CRT-addressed ILA® devices developed previously by Hughes-JVC, the LC-on-CMOS device was digitally addressed. At 0.9 in. on the diagonal, it was much smaller and lighter than the CRT-addressed devices.

The projector used three of the D-ILA™ devices working through a single lens to produce a maximum screen resolution of 1365 x 1024 pixels with a luminous flux of 1000 ANSI lumens and a contrast ratio of more than 250:1. The projector handled a full SXGA image without scaling or loss of quality, scaled smoothly for lower screen resolutions, and could handle 1000 TV lines for full HDTV compatibility. With a weight of 28.6 lbs., the projector was intended to be transportable and to offer easy set-up. With the 1998 Gold Award, the Committee acknowledged a quarter century of dedicated light-valve development at Hughes and Hughes-JVC.

Silver Award: Alcatel's One-Touch Com™ use a 40 x 80-mm backlit LCD to combine the functions of a GSM digital cellular phone, a personal organizer, a wireless Internet e-mail communicator using SMTP and POP3 protocols, a short-message (SMS) communicator, and PC companion. A specially formatted SMS message sent to the One-Touch Com™ could update the calendar automatically. PC synchronization could be done via the PC's serial port or wirelessly through the integrated IrDA infrared port.

The key to getting all of this into a compact 240-gram package was the relatively large display, which could present a GUI, interactive data screens appropriate to the various functions, a soft keypad for dialing phone numbers, and a soft alphanumeric keyboard that was actuated with a stylus.

Alcatel created a sophisticated multi-functional product that could open Internet e-mail to a wide range of users, without any need for computer equipment or expertise. The product was based on a highly intelligent design that was enabled by display technology and a thoughtful user interface.

Display Component or Material of the Year Awards

Gold Award: Silicon Image's PanelLink™ was the first implementation of transition-minimized differential signaling (TMDS), setting the stage for substantially less-expensive digital flat-panel monitors (FPMs) and universal controller cards that economically supported both TMDS and traditional analog monitors.

PanelLink™ implemented TMDS with a transmitter-receiver chipset, with the chip residing on either a single-purpose TMDS or universal graphics controller card. A twisted-pair cable up to 5m long connected the two chips.

Dai Nippon also won a Gold DCMA award in 1998 for its Ultra-Contrast Screen. Conventional double-lentricular "black stripe" screens, used with Fresnel lenses in television and other rear-projection applications, had been very effective in providing high screen gain with low reflection of ambient light for high contrast. But the pixel pitch of these screens couldn't be reduced much below 0.3mm, making them unsuitable for SXGA and HDTV applications. At these higher screen resolutions, it was possible to use single-lenticular screens, but the lack of black stripes on these screens meant reflections were higher and contrast lower. The addition of a contrast-enhancement filter would have provided increased contrast, but at the cost of screen luminance.

Dai Nippon Printing Company helped resolve that problem with its ultra-high contrast screen (UCS), a lenticular screen with 0.14-mm pitch that incorporated an internal ambient-light absorption system (ALAS) that provided improved contrast without an external black matrix or contrast-enhancement layer. As the first high-gain ehanced-contrast solution for single-light-source (LCD, DMD, etc.) rear projectors, UCS was widely accepted.

1999

Display of the Year Awards

Gold Award: Toshiba Corp.'s family of direct-view, low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS) TFT-LCDs with integrated drivers. Low power consumption and higher durability made these 4", 8.4" and 10.4" LTPS TFT LCDs ideal for portable applications. Toshiba's aggressive development and commercialization of LTPS TFT-LCDs provided system designers with thin, light-weight displays that did not require external LCD drivers, resulting in more reliable displays that were more resistant to mechanical stress.

Silver Award: MicroOptical Corp.'s Clip-on & Invisible Monitor™, an eyeglass display that put a microdisplay in the ear piece of a superficially ordinary pair of eyeglasses, and reflected the image into the eye with a virtually invisible prism embedded in the eyeglass lens. The result was a one-ounce virtual display that provided a clear, sharp virtual image in front of the user. The quarter-VGA model weighed only 100 grams and added only about $250 to the cost of a prescription pair of eyeglasses.

Display Product of the Year Awards

Gold Award: Sharp Corp.'s 20-in. LCD Color TV was, at the time, the world's largest-screen, commercially available direct-view AMLCD TV. The 640x480-pixel display had a viewing angle of 120° horizontal and 100° vertical, and an enhanced color filter that combined with the bright backlight to produce substantially enhanced color purity and a 40,000-hour lifetime.

Silver Award: Silicon Graphics Inc.'s 1600SW digital, wide-screen professional LCD monitor. The 1600SW featured a 17.3-in. SuperWide™ screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio and 1600x1024 pixels. The monitor combined wide viewing angles of 120º horizontal and +45 /55 vertical, with a response time fast enough for viewing video and interacting with 3D models, making it ideal for content creators, engineers, and financial professionals.

Display Material or Component of the Year Awards

Gold Award: Pixelworks Inc.'s PW364/264 Single-chip ImageProcessor™ Display Controllers were the world's first single-chip flat-panel display controllers. The chip - the first 0.25-micron system-level-integration ASIC with embedded DRAM - contained half a million gates of random logic, a 32-Mb SDRAM core, and an on-board integrated 16-bit processor running at up to 133 MHZ. With this product, Pixelworks made a giant step toward reducing the size and cost of LCD controller boards and toward bringing LCDs into the monitor mainstream.

Silver Award: Digital Display Working Group's Digital Video Interface (DVI). The DVI is a digital interface standard that was developed by a group of industry leaders including Compaq, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, NEC, and Silicon Image, and earned the general acceptance of the display and computer industries. The standard specifies a single plug and connector that encompasses both the digital and legacy VGA interfaces, as well as a digital-only plug and connector, answering the industry need "for a common digital connectivity specification for digital displays and high-performance PCs while allowing for existing analog support." DVI handles bandwidths in excess of 160 MHZ, and thus supports UXGA and HDTV with a single set of links. At the time of the DYAs, DVI was expected to accelerate the trend to routine support of digital displays by PC-based controllers, thus reducing the cost of digital liquid-crystal monitors.

2000

Display of the Year Awards

Gold Award: eMagin Corp.'s OLED-on-Silicon microdisplay, uniquely combined two of the industry's most exciting technologies: organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and display-on-silicon microdisplays.

Silver Award: Ise Electronics Corp.'s carbon-nanotube (CNT) FED high-brightness lighting element was the first commercial product to use CNT field-emission technology.

Display Product of the Year Awards

Gold Award: inViso's eCase incorporated its OptiScape II LCOS microdisplay module for a hand-held viewer that could be synchronized with a PC. This allowed the user to carry documents while on the go and to view them at approximately the same resolution and color depth as on a desktop monitor.

Silver Award: Sharp Corp. and Semiconductor Energy Laboratory Co., Ltd. for Sharp's LC-R60HDU 60-inch high-definition rear-projection video monitor, the first commercial product using LCD imagers with thin-film transistors made from continuous-grain silicon (CGS). The monitor presented SXGA images with the very high luminance of 1000 cd/m2 and a contrast ratio of 400:1.

Display Material or Component of the Year Awards

Gold Award: DigiLens' Application-Specific Integrated Filter (ASIF™), which applied a new electrically switchable Bragg grating technology to make a solid-state replacement for the mechanical color wheel used to obtain full color from a one-panel projection display.

Silver Award: Toppan Printing Co. Ltd. for its EBU-CF matrix color filter, which featured new pigments and dispersing parameters matched to new phosphor specifications for the backlight used with the filter. The result was the first color filter that allowed LCD TV sets and computer monitors to render colors as well as their CRT-based competitors. The filter was the first to comply with European Broadcasting Union (EBU) color-reproduction standards.

2001

Display of the Year Awards

Gold Award: Rainbow Displays for its Model 3750 37.5-inch AMLCD panel, which seamlessly - invisibly - tiled three 21.4-in. AMLCDs in a one-by-three array. Seamless tiling had proven to be surprisingly difficult; Rainbow was the first company to successfully implement the technology in a commercial product.

Silver Award: IBM Research Laboratories  for its Model T220 9.2-megapixel AMLCD - 3840x2400 addressable pixels on a 22.2-in.-diagonal screen for a pixel density of 204 ppi (80 pixels/cm). The T220 was the product of years of research by IBM exploring the technology and benefits of LCDs with nearly photographic quality.

Display Product of the Year Awards

Gold Award: Minolta, for pioneering the use of a liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCoS) microdisplay as the viewfinder in a digital still camera, replacing the optical viewfinder that had not changed in principle since its use on 35-mm film cameras of the 1930s.

Silver Award: Not presented in 2001.

Display Material or Component of the Year Award

Gold Award: Alien Technology's Fluidic Self-Assembly (FSA) process automatically placed small encapsulated integrated circuits called NanoBlocks™ into matching depressions in a display's backplane. This innovative approach to packaging display (and other) electronics showed potential for making very rugged and inexpensive devices.

Silver Award: MOXTEK's ProFlux™ polarizer, made of a very-fine-pitch wire grid. The wire-grid polarizer tolerated the high light intensities and temperatures found in projectors, and was capable of contrast ratios much higher than those produced by conventional polarizing beam splitters.

2002

Display of the Year Awards

Gold Award: Eastman Kodak's AM550L organic light-emitting-diode (OLED) display. At a time when the first OLED products to appear in consumer products were simple monochrome or "area color" alphanumeric displays, Kodak and manufacturing partner Sanyo ramped up volume manufacturing of this full-color, active-matrix, video-capable OLED with vibrant, saturated colors. The AM550L, which had a 2.16-inch (5.48-cm) diagonal and 521x218 pixels, produced a bright image, consumed 450 mW of power (typical), and weighed just 8 grams. It was intended for applications such as cell phones, PDAs, digital still cameras, DVD players, and automotive and industrial uses.

Silver Award: Samsung Electronics' 40-in. wide-XGA TFT-LCD module. Already seen in various forms for several years, the "40-inch" became commercially available less than a year before the 2002 DYAs. As the first TFT-LCD module to break the 30-inch barrier, this device demonstrated that LCDs could compete with PDPs in the markets for public information displays and large-screen TV. That same year, larger prototypes were announced by Samsung and rival LG.Philips Display.

Display Product of the Year Awards

Gold Award: Samsung Electronics scored another win for its 43- and 50-in. rear-projection HDTV monitors. These were the first mainstream rear-projection HDTVs using Texas Instruments' DLP™ microdisplays. Samsung's field-sequential color projection engine used one microdisplay for economy, and with initial prices beginning at less than $4,000, the company entered the market at a competitive price point.

Silver Award: Sony Corp.'s KF-60DX100 Grand Wega 60-in. rear-projection LCD HDTV incorporated several new technologies in 2002. These new technologies included a 1.35-in.-wide-XGA (1366x768-pixel) high-temperature-polysilicon (HTPS) LCD panel, a dot-line inversion drive scheme, and a three-panel optical engine that featured corner-to-corner high resolution and a user-replaceable UHP lamp.

Display Material or Component of the Year

Gold Award: Optiva, Inc.'s Thin Crystal Film™ Polarizers, which represented a fundamentally new way of making polarizers based on a molecularly engineered nanomaterial. When applied to a glass or plastic substrate, the company's TCF™ polarizing material self-assembled into a supramolecular liquid-crystal structure. The result was a polarizing film less than 1 micrometer thick, compared to 200 micrometers for a traditional polarizer. The new polarizer was highly customizable, much cheaper than traditional polarizers, and could be applied to the inner sides of LCD substrates, protecting them from scratches and abrasions, and thus creating more rugged LCD displays.

Silver Award: DuPont Holographics' holographic reflectors, which inexpensively and dramatically improved the visibility of portable, reflective liquid-crystal displays.

2003

Display of the Year Awards

Gold Award: LG.Philips LCD's 20.1-in. UXGA TFT-LCD panel with copper bus lines. As active-matrix liquid-crystal displays (AMLCDs) get larger, the high resistivity of aluminum alloy bus lines results in flicker and non-uniform images across the panel. Increasing the width of the lines reduces the resistance but worsens aperture ratio, which reduces brightness or increases power consumption. Copper is a much better conductor than aluminum alloy, but copper can be a contaminant for downstream processes.

In its 20.1-in. UXGA AMLCD, LG.Philips LCD developed a way of using copper bus lines that does not affect downstream processes; in addition, the copper process results in one less deposition step and two fewer etch steps. The copper-bus display's flicker was 25 dB down, with a luminance of 250 nits and power consumption of less than 30W.

Silver Award: Hitachi Ltd.'s polysilicon-TFT displays made with a low-temperature process on 730x920-mm glass substrates. By developing a low-temperature (450EC) process for making polysilicon TFT-LCDs, which eliminates the need for pre-annealing the glass substrate, Hitachi Ltd. made it possible to produce relatively low-cost polysilicon displays on relatively large glass substrates.

In 2003, the company was manufacturing two small, full-color, low-power TFT-LCD displays using the process. Hitachi said the process should be capable of fabricating LCD and OLED panels up to 20 inches on the diagonal on glass substrates without pre-annealing.

Display Product of the Year Awards

Gold Award: Mitsubishi Electric Corp.'s ultra-thin, single-DMD™, XGA rear-projection monitor. With its tour-de-force optical system, the LVP-60XT20 (VS-60XT20U outside of Japan) provided a 60-in. display in a package only 10.2 inches deep. This allowed rear-projection monitors to be considered as direct alternatives to flat panels in many public information and advertising applications.

Silver Award: Eastman Kodak's EasyShare LS633 digital still camera, the first consumer product ever to incorporate a full-color active-matrix OLED display. Kodak integrated the AM550L full-color OLED display it made with Sanyo into the Kodak EasyShare LS633 digital still camera.

Display Material or Component of the Year Awards

Gold Award: Universal Display Corp. and PPG Industries' new generation of red and green phosphorescent OLED materials and device structures with three to four times the efficiency of conventional fluorescent materials. The phosphorescent materials permitted Samsung SDI to build the first prototype OLED cell-phone display that is more efficient than an equivalent AMLCD.

Silver Award: NXT's SoundVu® Distributed Mode Loudspeaker (DML) technology, in which actuators on the periphery of a panel turned the entire panel into a speaker that produced high-quality, stereo sound. The apparent source of the sound could be made to coincide with the location of the image that is "originating" the sound, so sound-vision synchronicity, which has been an important part of commercial cinema since the 1940s, could now be incorporated in desktop and laptop PCs, and in flat-panel TVs. The technology has been used by NEC, Sharp, and others.

2004

Display of the Year Awards

Gold Award: LG.Philips LCD's LC550W01-A5 LCD Module, the first commercially available thin-film transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT-LCD) module for television sets in the mid-50-in. range. With the development of the LCD module, LG.Philips addressed the challenges of designing large TFT-LCD modules for television applications with a variety of innovative technologies.

Silver Award: Nemoptic BiNem®'s Bi-Stable LCD, a bi-stable variation on the classic supertwisted nematic (STN) LCD that made the technology compatible with existing STN manufacturing lines. Nemoptic's black-and-white, VGA version of the display was manufactured and integrated into eBooks by Nemoptic licensee Picvue, earning Nemoptic the 2004 Display of the Year Silver Award.

Display Product of the Year Awards

Gold Award: Sony's LIBRIé eBook reinvigorated the eBook category by integrating a bi-stable, electrophoretic, "electronic paper" display from the team of E Ink and Philips. The Display of the Year Awards Committee bestowed Sony Corp. with the 2004 Display Product of the Year Gold Award for incorporating novel display technology in the design of an eBook that is more appealing to consumers and bringing the eBook closer to fulfilling its potential.

Silver Award: Motorola's RAZR V3 Cell Phone. From its 13.9 mm-thick anodized aluminum case and an all-up weight of only 95 grams, to the chemically etched keypad created from a single sheet of nickel-plated copper alloy, the two state-of-the-art displays, and its long list of features, Motorola's RAZR V3 was sleek and stunning. For raising the ubiquitous cellular telephone to new levels of elegance and functionality, the awards committee honored Motorola with the 2004 Display Product of the Year Silver Award.

Display Material or Component of the Year Awards

Gold Award: E Ink's Microencapsulated Electrophoretic Front-Plane Laminate (FPL) for Paper-Like Displays showed substantial innovation in the science and technology of electrophoretic front planes. E Ink solved a number of difficulties with electrophoretic displays and, working with partner Philips, commercialized a display that exhibited two levels of gray in addition to black and white, with all levels being stable when power is removed.

Silver Award: Lumileds Lighting LLC's Luxeon LED Module for Backlights pioneered practical LED backlight modules for liquid-crystal displays.

2005

Display of the Year Awards

Gold Award: The Philips 3D Solutions 42-in. 3D Intelligent Display is perhaps the most comprehensive 3D solution on the market today. It is tailored to professional markets including digital signage, a growing area of interest for 3D displays, which can attract more attention than traditional 2D signs. The 42-in. LCD with slanted multi-view lenticular lens technology is based on Philips WOWvx technologies, and provides autostereoscopic 3D images with full brightness (460 cd/m2), full contrast (1000:1) and true color representation. The display is based on a 1920x1080 high-definition (HD) panel, enabling great picture quality in both 2D and 3D mode. It allows multiple users to view 3D content at the same time within a large comfort zone.

Silver Award: Sharp Corp. and Sharp Laboratories of Europe Ltd.'s Two-Way Viewing Angle LCD, the world's first mass-produced display capable of showing different information simultaneously to two different users. It initially rolled out in July 2005 as a 7-in. w-VGA LCD based on Sharp's parallax barrier 3D technology. A parallax barrier is superimposed on a thin-film-transistor (TFT) LCD, causing light from the backlight to separate into right and left directions. This allows the two images to be separated by a wide angle, with each viewing position enjoying considerable viewing freedom and minimal cross talk (or image mixing). The product was initially targeted for the automotive market, allowing the driver to view a GPS screen or safety information while the passenger can watch a DVD or, eventually, digital TV. Sharp believes the market for this technology extends beyond the car, and says it can be applied to any display technology, including emissive displays, and for any screen size, from the smallest mobile phone display to a 65-in. screen.

Display Product of the Year Awards

Gold Award: SmartDisplayer Technology Co. Ltd.'s Smart Card with Embedded Electronic Paper Display is a flexible, 0.25mm-thin, ultra-low-power bistable display. SiPix Imaging Inc.'s Microcup® Electronic Paper distinguishes this smart card, allowing for increased security, control and personalization. This is the first flexible display panel to be embedded into an ISO-compliant payment card. The DisplayCard was developed by Innovative Card Technologies and authentication expert nCryptone. Due to the challenging requirements for the DisplayCard, Innovative Card Technologies/nCryptone chose SmartDisplayer's flexible display for several reasons: flexibility, low power consumption, impact-resistiveness, and extreme thinness. SiPix Microcup® Electronic Paper met all these requirements, with the added benefit of display-image retention even with the power removed.

Silver Award: Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.'s Pocket Imager (SP-P300ME) is the world's first market-launched projector with a light-emitting-diode (LED) light source, offering unparalleled brightness (25 ANSI lumens) and contrast ratio (1000:1) when compared to other similar-sized projectors. The Pocket Imager measures 12.7 cm x 9.3 cm x 5 7m and weighs 700 grams. The unit features a digital light projector (DLP) light engine with a novel LED light source. The display is a .55-in. digital micromirror device (DMD). A special cooling system reduces the heat coming out from many points with only one fan, which helps this product attain low audible noise (under 25dB) during operation. It can project images at various screen sizes, ranging from 12 in. to 63 in., without affecting contrast at a resolution of 800x600 pixels. The adaptable focus range is .4m to 3m.

Display Material or Component of the Year Awards

Gold Award: Dai Nippon Printing Co. Ltd.'s Crystal Illusion Screen is a transparent optical front-projection screen on which bright, crisp images can be reproduced in a bright room. The reproduction of sharp, large-sized images floating in mid-air makes it possible to open a new projection display market. High-contrast pictures can be displayed even in bright rooms because the new screen uses cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs). With a peak gain of 2.0 and 50% transparency, the Crystal Illusion Screen is available in sizes of up to 75 inches in a 16:9 format.

Silver Award: 3M Optical Systems Division's Vikuiti™ () LCOS Optical Core (the "Optical Core"), which is lead- and cadmium-free in compliance with EU RoHS regulations, enables a high-quality television image with the lowest possible Liquid Crystal On Silicon (LCOS) projection light-engine cost and reduced light-engine component count. The key enabling technology in the Optical Core is Multilayer Optical Film ("MOF") Polarizing Beam Splitter ("PBS") film. This film comprises many hundred layer-pairs of two polymers, one of which is uniaxially birefringent while the other is homogeneous. By matching the index of the homogeneous layers with the ordinary index of the birefringent layers, light polarized perpendicular to the extraordinary axis is transmitted through the film unimpeded. However, light polarized along the extraordinary axis is partially reflected at each inter-layer interface. Forming a quarter-wave stack of these layers, so light can be separated into two orthogonal polarization states with high extinction, enhances this reflection. This is important for producing high-performance television images. Optical Core performance is industry leading, including contrast values typically exceeding 6000:1 with much higher transmission efficiency than other systems. The PBSs have been shown to have over 30% higher transmission than MacNeille or wire-grid PBS designs (c.f. Philips' paper 64.1 at SID '05). Incorporation of this technology into brighter systems, such as front projectors for home theater and conference rooms, is under development. Implementation of other approaches is also in process to simplify imager compensation, achieve new levels of ANSI Contrast, and further decrease engine costs.

2007*

*Note: The year of the awards was changed in 2007 to reflect the year in which the award was given out - hence, there is no 2006 award.

Display Component of the Year

Gold Award: Corning Inc. Eagle XG™ Glass Substrate
Launched in 2006, EAGLE XG™ Glass Substrate is the industry's first LCD glass substrate that contains no added heavy metals and halides-traditionally, glass production has required the use of arsenic, antimony and/or halides to prevent bubbles in the glass. EAGLE XG is currently the most environmentally friendly substrate available. Its revolutionary new glass composition provides added value while retaining all of the enabling attributes of the previous industry standard, Corning EAGLE2000™ substrates, including density, durability, thermal properties and a pristine surface optimized for the manufacture of large, high-resolution displays. At the end-of-life for an LCD with EAGLE XG, the absence of hazardous materials increases the options for recycling and makes disposal less of an issue.

Silver Award: Luminus Devices PhlatLight LEDs
PhlatLight™ LEDs (light-emitting diodes) are an advanced solid-state light source based on Luminus Devices' patented photonic lattice technology. PhlatLight LEDs have an embedded, sub-wavelength microstructure that radically influences the way light is emitted out of the LEDs. Luminus has leveraged its expertise in photonic lattice technology to develop the proprietary PhlatLight product family for use in a variety of applications, including projection TVs and other advanced, high-definition displays. PhlatLight technology optimizes light extraction by suppressing the lateral propagation of photons inside the chip of LEDs. The photonic lattices direct the photons to the front surface of the LED, emitting substantially more light and in a narrower, collimated beam that is more readily collected and delivered to its target than with traditional LEDs. The photonic-lattice technology in PhlatLight products is what sets them apart as an entirely new category of LEDs.

Display of the Year

Gold Award: Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.: High Contrast, Wide Color Gamut, LED-Backlit LCD TV (LE40M91B)
The Samsung LE40M91B 40-inch LED backlit TV lead the pack of LED-backlit TVs that entered the marketplace in force for the first time in 2006. This thin-film transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT-LCD) TV combines superior brightness and maximum image fidelity to deliver a high-quality high-definition (HD) viewing experience. Featuring a dynamic contrast ratio of 10,000:1-the highest available today-the sleek, new LE40M91B allows for exceptionally dark blacks against the brightest whites. By re-mapping the complete range of primary colors through a mercury-free LED backlight, Samsung has extended the wide color gamut to an industry-leading 145% of the EBU standard. Its high-definition 1366x768 pixel resolution accentuates the panel's subtly understated black sheen appearance with richly textured wide-screen panoramas in a 16:9 aspect ratio. Other significant visual achievements include the incorporation of 10-bit gray-level fidelity, elimination of motion judder, and prevention of smearing along the edges of the picture that can occur on flat screens during fast-moving scenes. With a response time of less than 8 milliseconds, the LE40M91B is virtually free of motion-picture blur with no false contouring. The display's refresh rate of 100Hz (EU), 120Hz (NTSC) produces an extremely clear picture with virtually no ghosting. In normal TVs, a new visual frame appears every 1/50th of a second (EU) or 1/60th of a second (US). Hold-type driving used in flat displays at this rate can result in the appearance of blurred images. By interpolating a new frame to be inserted between each set of incoming frames, the tendency toward motion-blur artifacts appears to have been virtually eliminated based on early reviews.

Silver Award: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.: World's First 103-Inch Diagonal 1080p Plasma Display
When it comes to displays, bigger is often better, and the sheer size of Panasonic's 103-inch diagonal 1080p Plasma TV is certainly an attention-grabber-it is the largest plasma display in the world. However, the performance of the TH-103PF series of plasma TVs was the reason for its selection as the 2007 Display of the Year Silver Award winner, not just its size. With industry leading 16-bit color reproduction, the TH-103PF series provides a wide-screen progressive display featuring full high-definition (HD) pixel resolution of 1,920 horizontal x 1,080 vertical, a contrast ratio of 5,000:1, and 4,096 equivalent steps of color gradation, delivering clear, crisp and dramatic fast-action video images. This 1080p display's screen resolution, which amounts to about 2 million pixels, equals twice the resolution of high-definition televisions that are commonly available today. It boasts an effective display area of approximately 89 inches wide by 50 inches high, which is equivalent in size to four 50-inch Panasonic plasma displays. A contrast-management system optimizes the contrast for each individual portion of the image displayed, while a high-precision Motion Pattern Noise Reduction circuit adjusts the image to enhance picture quality by detecting motion patterns that generate noise. Panasonic overcome numerous technical hurdles by developing a new rib structure and phosphor for these super large panels. The 103-inch 1080p plasma panel features consistent and uniform discharge, delivering the same accurate images from the center to every corner of the screen and brightness as the current 50-inch HD model.

Display Application of the Year

Gold Award: Actuality Systems Inc.: PerspectaRAD
PerspectaRAD is a significant step forward in the display field because it is the first time a high-resolution volumetric 3-D display is in pre-clinical studies for cancer treatment. It is the first display technology to deliver high-resolution, real-time animated medical imagery to clinicians in true autostereoscopic 3-D (3-D without "goggles"). PerspectaRAD is a combination of cancer-treatment software, a volumetric 3-D display, and a 3-D haptic interface-it connects to existing Philips Medical radiation therapy work stations to give radiation oncologists improved tumor coverage with high accuracy. The traditional method of radiation oncology is problematic because doctors are performing a complex 3-D procedure on 2-D displays. PerspectaRAD solves these problems, allowing physicians to view the CT scan in a true volumetric 3-D display: the Perspecta Spatial 3-D Display. It creates a floating, hologram-like 3-D image that can be seen from any angle. It instantly lets the doctors see the location of the tumor and organs in relation to each other. The Perspecta Display includes software and hardware that take 3-D data, such as a CAT scan, and "slices" it into 198 pieces around a central axis, like slicing an apple. The sequence of slices are relayed by several-fold mirrors and focused by spinning projection optics onto a diffuse screen that rotates at 900 rpm. The imagery and the screen are synchronized, and in aggregate create a walk-around 3-D image 10 inches in diameter composed of 100 million voxels (volume pixels). It is the highest-resolution volumetric display ever built, and is run off a single Windows XP PC.

Silver Award: Motorola MOTOFONE F3
Motorola's Motofone F3 handset employs a revolutionary ClearVision display that addresses the concerns that have made cell phone adoption in many emerging nations an issue, specifically cost and power usage. This the first time that a bistable display technology has been used in a high-volume product. The Motofone F3's ClearVision display leverages low-cost, low-power electrophoretic-display (EPD) technology from E Ink Corp. to provide users with a 2-inches-diagonal, highly readable screen viewable even in bright sunlight. The Motofone F3 is one of the few entry-level mobile phones that incorporates significant technology innovations including the EPD, dual antenna, single transducer and other SW improvements into a highly affordable device.