news archive
Samsung Announces World's First 40-inch TFT-LCD
Seoul, Korea, August 22 - Samsung Electronics today announced the development of a 40-inch (980.9mm x 629.6mm) TFT-LCD, ushering in the era of wide-screen TFT-LCD TVs. The introduction received extensive coverage in Korea, with photographs of the new display appearing prominently in major newspapers.
The new Wide-XGA display has approximately 980,000 pixels (1280x768). The aspect ratio is 15:9 and the screen measures 40 inches diagonally. It is targeted for use in high-performance, wide-screen digital TVs. In 1997, Samsung Electronics was the first company to introduce a 30-inch thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display
(TFT-LCD). Until now, 30 inches had been considered the technological limit for this type of display. Samsung began working on the 40-inch model last year, and achieved its technology breakthrough after just ten months. Samsung regards its achievement as a technology breakthrough for TFT-LCDs.
Samsung has applied its proprietary Patterned Vertical Alignment (PVA) technology to the new 40-inch, resulting in a viewing angle of 170 degrees and a gray-to-gray response of just 12 milliseconds, fast enough to fully support moving pictures without smear or other motion artifacts. The full-color display reproduces 16.7 million color tones. The black-and-white contrast ratio is 600:1 and luminance is 500
cd/m².
The new display has more than twice the pixels of a 42-inch VGA plasma display panel, giving it much better picture clarity. At the same time, the TFT-LCD operates on 180 watts, about half the power required by a PDP of similar size. The TFT-LCD is guaranteed to last 50,000 hours, three times the lifetime of a PDP. After this period, one simply has to replace the backlight to continue using the product.
Today, TFT-LCDs and PDPs are competing for supremacy in the flat-panel TV market. Samsung expects its new TFT-LCD to open the door for much broader use of TFT-LCDs in wide-screen TVs. In addition to the new 40-inch version, the company plans to offer a variety of TFT-LCDs for TVs, including 15-, 17-, and 20-inch models. LCD TV is a growing market. The market intelligence firm DisplaySearch estimates that the world LCD TV market will total 2.52 million units this year and grow at least 40 percent a year to reach 9.8 million units by 2005.
Samsung will exhibit the new 40-inch TFT-LCD at the International Meeting on Information Displays 2001, in Daegu, Korea, August 28-31. Jun Souk, Vice President of Samsung Electronics, Korea, AMLCD Division, and a product developer in the division, plans to submit a paper describing the new display in detail for SID 2002, to be held in Boston, May 19-24, 2002, where he also plans to demonstrate the display.
Information: Jun Souk, email: souk@samsung.co.kr,
www.samsungelectronics.com.
Prices for Monitor LCDs Fall 28% in Q2, DisplaySearch Says; Prices for PDA LCDs Rise
Austin, Texas, August 22, 2001 - In the recently issued edition of its
Quarterly Large-Area LCD Pricing Report, DisplaySearch reports that a weighted average of the prices of LCD
modules intended for monitor applications fell a record 28.4% in Q2 to less than $300. The dramatic price reductions led to a sequential 40% increase in Q2 monitor module shipments. Projected price reductions of 13% in Q3 are expected to boost shipments by an additional 30% sequentially or 131% year-to-year. The prices for notebook PC modules were substantially lower, too, but notebook PC shipments remain sluggish, with notebook module shipments expected to rise just 10%. Although notebook PC unit growth is projected to be less than 1/10th of LCD monitor growth in 2001, notebook PCs are continuing to gain share vs. desktop PCs, and the average notebook size and resolution continues to increase.
Slower growth in the demand for notebook and small/medium, combined with high capital spending from 1999-2001, will extend the TFT-LCD surplus and cause price reductions to continue through November for most large-area panels, DisplaySearch said. From December to March, only the prices of panels larger than 15 inches are expected to fall because of their higher margins. Panels from 10 to 15 inches are already priced at or below cost.
In its Quarterly Small/Medium LCD Pricing Report, DisplaySearch says that the weighted average of prices for small and medium displays prices fell 11% sequentially in Q2, led by mobile-phone displays at 15%, and followed by handheld-PC displays at 9% and digital-still-camera displays at 8%. Only PDA/SmartPhone-display prices increased because of a significant increase in penetration of higher-performance TFT-LCDs for the high-end PDA market and a sharp decline in low-end PDA display-module shipments. The report says that the AMLCD share of the PDA/SmartPhone market rose from 35% to 52% from Q1 to Q2. The migration of mobile phones to color is expected to support ASP increases in Q3.
The detailed reports are available from DisplaySearch, and are published in English and Japanese editions.
Information: info@displaysearch.com,
www.displaysearch.com.
"Year of the MicroDisplay" Celebrated at MicroDisplay 2001
Westminster, Colorado, August 15 - MicroDisplay 2001, held at the Westin Hotel in Westminster, Colorado from August 13 to 15, had a largely celebratory tone. "Finally," said Chris Chinnock, editor of
Microdisplay Report, in the presentation he gave this morning summarizing the current state of microdisplay technology, "we have a year we can call the 'year of the microdisplay,'" although he reserved the right to use the term next year, as well, in anticipation of increasing high-volume activity.
The "year of the microdisplay" label is justified for 2001, though, because there are enough high-volume deliveries this year, and enough design wins for the immediate future, to establish microdisplays as one of the accepted display categories with an assured future. In his keynote address, "LCoS: Walking the Walk?", Ken Werner, editor of
Information Display, noted that Displaytech had shipped 700,000 viewfinder modules so far this year, Kopin is currently making 300,000 viewfinder displays per month, Texas Instruments had shipped 750,000 DLP™ subsystems (or displays for those subsystems) through April, and Epson and Sony were selling enough miniature high-temperature polysilicon LCDs to go into the majority of the 1.1-million presentation projection systems to be sold in 2001. Overall, said Kimberly Allen of Stanford Resources, microdisplay sales should grow from $718 million this year to $1.5 billion in 2006. (Allen emphasized that these numbers were based on preliminary data, and refer to the value of panel sales only - not complete modules.)
In the exhibit area, Displaytech was showing the Samsung rear-projection HDTV set that uses Displaytech microdisplays, and Three-Five Systems was showing the RCA Scenium rear-projection HDTV set that uses Three-Five microdisplays. Both of these companies, along with Zight, were showing near-the-eye microdisplay applications. Microvision was showing its monochrome laser-scanning retinal display. The display clearly showed its military roots, but Microvision's Brett Wall said they were working on a much more compact consumer model using MEMS devices to steer the collimated light beam. When
Information Display asked about the probable difficulty of marketing a consumer device that scans a laser beam across the consumer's retina, Wall - seemingly delighted at the question -- replied that the consumer device will use non-laser LEDs so the issue will never arise.
The interesting collection of technical papers included some surprises. One, from Wayne Cranton and his colleagues at Nottingham Trent University, described a miniature thin-film electroluminescent (TFEL) display that emits laterally. Instead of trying to overcome the tendency of TFELs to conduct light along the EL-dielectric sandwich, so that most of the light exits through the plane of the panel, which is what everybody else does, the Nottingham team makes the light pipe as efficient as possible, and collects the light where it exits with 90-degree reflectors. The result is emission at very high intensities. Luminance can reach 5000 foot-lamberts. (More details can be found in the
Digest of Papers, available from SID headquarters, and an article is being planned for
Information Display.)
Stuart Spitzer and George Whiteside of Polaroid described an interesting concept for printing digital photographs. A camera using an LCoS microdisplay for viewing and monitoring has the ability to redirect the image out of a port in the camera's side, where it is designed to mate with a print head that uses a standard Polaroid film pack. Power for printing is obtained entirely from the film pack's flat battery. The authors paid careful attention to both the optics and the transformation curves, which resulted in very good-looking prints with no adjustments required by the user. Although this is a clever and well-implemented idea that offers Polaroid a way to sell more film packs in the digital era, Polaroid's current financial difficulties may prevent commercialization.
Finally, a seemingly modest paper - "Measuring Physical Parameters of Near to Eye Displays" by Tapani Levola and Jarkko Viinikanoja of Nokia Research Center - could be the proverbial pin that, when dropped, starts an avalanche. The authors described the design and construction of a measuring apparatus that measures the parameters of a binocular NTE system from the perspective of what the human can actually see, and then presented their measurements of two commercial head-mounted displays (HMDs), the Oympus HMD 700 and the Sony LDI-D100. "The meat of the issue," said Al Hildebrand, CEO and Founder of inViso, "is that many of the numbers that matter are not included in the specifications for these [and other binocular] products. For the first time, the Nokia paper publicly presents some of the critical parameters for such products." Among the values presented in the paper are focus distance (at center and edge), convergence distance, exit pupil (horizontal and vertical), eye relief, and vertical misalignment of the two images.
Hildebrand zeroed in on Nokia's vertical misalignment findings for the HMDs: 10 arc minutes for the Olympus product and 20 arc minutes for the Sony. Said Hildebrand: "Excessive misalignment could be one of the worst sources of discomfort in binocular displays [when they are used for an extended period of time]." He noted that inViso's maximum spec is 8 arc minutes, and most of what they ship is 4 arc minutes.
In a conversation following the talk, Levola expressed some surprise at the numbers he and his coauthor had obtained for eye-relief, which were 22 mm for the Olympus and 15 mm for the Sony. Zight and inViso have eye-relief specs of 25-35 mm.
One of the issues raised at MicroDisplay 2001, was why binocular HMDs have not sold well in the past. Most people who commented agreed that the resolution has been too low and the price too high, and that this is now changing. But it is clear that HMDs must be comfortable and enjoyable to use for extended periods of time if they are to sell well. The Nokia paper may be supplying us with important guidance for the immediate future.
MicroDisplay 2001 was sponsored by the Society for Information Display and co-sponsored by DisplayTech, Silicon Bandwidth, Zight, Three-Five Systems, and TLC International. The location and dates for MicroDisplay 2002 are being discussed now.
Information: Society for Information Display, www.sid.org.
Hitachi to Remain in CRT Monitor Business; Will Acquire Tubes in China
Norwalk, Connecticut, August 7 - Reports that Hitachi is abandoning the CRT monitor business are wrong, a spokesperson for Hitachi America told Information Display today. The report was picked up from a news release distributed by Hitachi, Ltd. In Japan, but the release was misinterpreted. What the release actually stated is that "Hitachi is ceasing production of CRT tubes, but will continue to produce CRT-based monitors, using tubes built to Hitachi specifications in China," the spokesperson said.
Hitachi America recently announced a value-priced 19-inch flat-faced CRT monitor with the very tight dot pitch of 0.20 mm horizontally and 0.13 mm vertically. The release for this product stressed Hitachi's commitment to expanding its CRT product line, but did not refer explicitly to the erroneous report.
Candescent Presents First Product Sample to Kaga Electronics
San Jose, California, July 27 - Candescent Technologies Corporation, a developer of Field Emission Display (FED) technology, presented its first product sample last week to premier customer Kaga Electronics Co. Ltd. The 5.3-inch Hiraga QVGA display was presented by Candescent President/CEO David White to Kaga President Isao Tsukamoto during a celebration commemorating Kaga's twentieth year of doing business in the U.S. At ten millimeters, this is the thinnest display Candescent has produced to date.
Kaga Electronics is Candescent's first customer, having signed a purchase and distribution agreement in December 2000. The agreement represents the first major volume-purchase commitment for Candescent's ThinCRT technology. It is the intention of the companies to enter into a distribution deal where Kaga will serve as Candescent's non-exclusive distributor for automotive displays in Japan. This product presentation initiates Kaga's evaluation of the Candescent product line in accordance with the companies' agreement.
Information: http://www.candescent.com,
http://www.taxan.co.jp.
