news archive
Slim CRTs Make
News at Asia Display/IMID
Daegu, Korea,
August 26 - This morning, Gert-Jan Hesselink appeared to be a
happy man. Hesselink, the Global Product Manager for color
picture tubes at LG.Philips Displays in Eindhoven, was watching
an attractive young woman with a wireless microphone explain the
benefits of LG.P's new SuperSlim 32-inch color picture tube (CPT)
to a crowd packing the LG.P booth. A superficially similar tube
was on exhibit next door in Samsung SDI's booth.
The combination
of two major CPT introductions in an era when most new
television products relate to flat-panel displays captured the
attention of major Korean newspapers early in the week, and many
students and members of the public came to look at the slim
tubes, as well as other display offerings from LG.P and Samsung.
Hesselink told
Information Display that the 21-inch version of the SuperSlim
tube, which had been introduced early in the year, is currently
in production and is being incorporated in TV sets by several
European manufacturers. Production of the 32-inch will begin the
fall, and several European manufacturers have committed to using
it, Hesselink said.
A 32-inch TV set
in the LG.Philips booth with the SuperSlim tube was strikingly
slimmer and lighter-looking than a conventional set.
Lighter-looking, but not lighter. The new tube weighs about the
same as a conventional one, with weight saved by having less
glass in the funnel balanced by more glass in the face plate and
walls, said Joseph Henrichs, Device CTO for LG.Philips Displays,
who was project manager for the tube's development. In addition,
he said, the yoke is slightly heavier than a conventional one.
In both the
workshop and technical sessions, Samsung Electronics and
LG.Philips LCD escalated their ongoing debate about whether a
patterned vertical-aligned (PVA) or an in-plane switching (IPS)
TFT-LCDs makes the better display for large-screen LCD
television. The latest versions are Super-PVA (S-PVA) and True
Wide IPS (TW-IPS), both of which are improvements over their
predecessors. But which is better than the other depends to some
extent on the metric you look at. S-PVA proponents like to
stress that technology's excellent black state over a wide
viewing angle, while TW-IPS has excellent color constancy in the
mid-tones out to wide viewing angles.
In an evening
session, Larry Weber made the case for plasma's strengths versus
LCD for television, countering claims that PDP has a much
shorter lifetime and poorer viewing characteristics off-angle
than do LCDs. He presented data showing that phosphor aging and
polymer-film yellowing in LCD backlight units actually give
LCD-TV a shorter lifetime to half luminance than is the case for
PDPs, which is the reverse of what many people believe. The
presentation contained many of the same arguments contained in
Weber's article in the current hardcopy issue of Information
Display.
An extensive
poster session presented an impressive amount of display work by
students at Korean universities.
The combination
of SID's Asia Display and the Korean Information Display
Society's International Meeting on Information Display (IMID)
was the largest display event ever held in Korea. Final
registration figures for the technical conference are not yet
in, but estimates were in the vicinity of 1700, compared with
about 1000 for IMID itself last year. At the exhibition --
organized by the Electronic Display Industrial Research
Association of Korea (EDIRAK), the Korean Information Display
Society, and The Electronic Times - 114 exhibitors from 7
countries occupied 270 booths. Exhibits Chair W. Y. (Wayne) Kim
said that some exhibitors had to be turned away for lack of
space. Next year, IMID will be held July 19-23 at the COEX
exhibition center in Seoul.
For more
extensive coverage Asia Display/IMID 2004, see the December
issue of the hardcopy Information Display.
Samsung
Develops World's First 2.6-inch VGA LCD Panel Made with
Amorphous Silicon
Seoul, Korea,
August 9 - Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd today announced the
world's first amorphous silicon (a-Si) 2.6-inch, VGA TFT-LCD,
which has 300 pixels-per-inch (ppi) pixel density. Using a-Si
technology, mobile-phone displays are now capable of exhibiting
the same VGA format found on notebook PCs and desktop monitors.
A mobile phone with one of these displays could be used as a
high-quality mobile TV.
"Samsung has
built its proprietary amorphous silicon gates into the LCD
panel," said Vice President Kim Hyung Guel of the Mobile
Display Business Team. "This superior technology will be
initially targeted for PDA phones and other top-end mobile
phones that require high image quality."
Amorphous silicon
and polycrystalline silicon are the two main silicon
technologies used for the thin-film transistors for LCDs.
Low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS) can achieve a high degree of
integration, making it the method of choice when producing
panels that require high resolution.
Conventional
wisdom has held that structural properties would limit a-Si
technology to 150-ppi pixel density. However, Samsung
Electronics engineers completed a 1.94-inch display with QVGA
pixel format (207 ppi) in May of this year, and continued to
improve upon their a-Si technology to achieve VGA resolution for
small- and mid-sized display panels, Samsung said.
Samsung's latest
LCD is a transflective model with 200:1 contrast ratio and 150
cd/m² luminance, which provides sharp images even when exposed
to bright summer sunshine, the company said. Mass production on
existing lines is scheduled to begin in December of this year.
Samsung plans to eventually expand the a-Si technology to
"smart phones" and mobile phones equipped for digital
multimedia broadcasting.
Information: www.samsung.com.
Sharp to
Install Second Production Line in Kameyama Plant
Osaka, Japan,
July 28 - In response to expanding demand for large LCD panels
for LCD-TVs, Sharp Corporation will install a second production
line for large-format LCDs within its Kameyama Plant, located in
Kameyama City, Mie Prefecture. The new line will begin operation
next month.
The Kameyama
Plant is a state-of-the-art, vertically integrated facility
designed to streamline production and inspection/testing
processes, as well as enhance material flow. This plant brings
together in a single operation Sharp's proprietary LCD and
video-imaging technologies, the company says. By integrating
start-to-finish production of large-screen LCD-TVs in a single
plant, Sharp expects further enhancement of the synergistic
interplay of core devices and end-user products. Kameyama
utilizes the first 1500x1800-mm substrates to be used in
production, Sharp says.
The installation
of the second production line will allow Sharp to roughly double
its substrate input capacity to 27,000 sheets per month,
compared to the capacity when the plant initially came on line
in January 2004. Sharp says the increased capacity will help
create a stable supply framework to meet burgeoning demand for
LCD panels for TVs, while further improving production
efficiency and strengthening price competitiveness, which will
help expand the market for LCD-TVs.
The demand for
LCD-TVs is expected to increase rapidly with the expansion of
terrestrial digital broadcasting. In addition, the penetration
of LCD-TVs in the total world color-TV market will be less than
6 percent for fiscal 2004 (according to internal company data),
so there is substantial room for growth.
Information: http://sharp-world.com/index.html.
