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Press Advisory
Contact
Dian Mecca
Tel: (203) 853-7069
Fax: (203) 855-9769
email: dmecca@sid.org |
For Immediate Release
|
SID 2000 Draws 6600 People to Long Beach for a Look at New
Market - Disrupting Displays - and the Chance to Buy Them
The first microdisplay-based rear-projection TV sets, a look at Kodak/Sanyo's stunning organic LED display,
and the news that hundreds of thousands of portable electronic devices will be using microdisplays by year's
end brought home to SID attendees just how different electronic products of the near future will be.
May 25, 2000 -- The trade-show portion of SID 2000, The Society for Information Display's annual International Conference, Symposium, and
Exhibition, ended in Long Beach, California, last Thursday with 340 mostly upbeat exhibitors packing up their high-tech wares and counting
the sales leads they had acquired over the previous three days. The exhibitors had occupied 425 booths, compared with 402 in 1999.
Attendees were buzzing because, in addition to the impressive evolutionary
improvements expected in the information display industry, they had seen products and prototypes that promise - or threaten - to disrupt traditional market structures. Among the most impressive of the
paradigm-busting displays was a 5.5-inch organic light-emitting-diode (OLED) display from the team of Kodak and Sanyo. The bright,
slender glass sandwich was driven by thin-film transistors and row and column drivers made of low-temperature polysilicon
(LTPS) and fabricated directly on the glass substrate. As a result, the only connection to the host system was a 25-conductor flat cable. Said consultant
Alan Sobel: "That Kodak/Sanyo display knocked my socks off!" But it's still a prototype. A 1.8- or 2.0-inch version should appear as the
viewfinder/monitor on Kodak and other digital cameras in time for the 2001 Christmas season - a viewfinder/monitor that should actually
be usable in sunlight. Ultimately, OLED developers believe the technology can be used to make large direct-view displays at costs much
lower than that for liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) and plasma display panels (PDPs).
Another approach to large inexpensive images is projection based on reflective microdisplays - displays less than an inch on the diagonal.
Texas Instruments' Digital Micromirror Device™ (DMD™) has had that arena to itself for several years. But SID 2000 attendees learned
that an alternative technology, liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS), which has been under development, is now being sold to OEMs in volume. A variety of products - from rear-projection televison sets and data/graphic projectors to lightweight headsets and bright viewers for digital
cameras and camcorders - will be introduced from now through the end of the year and beyond.
It was only in comparison to these revolutionary technologies that the showing of wide-format, high-resolution 22-inch AMLCD displays
suitable for HDTV by Samsung and others could seem conventional. And Samsung was also pushing AMLCDs with the home-grown
"SXGA+" format - 1400x1050 pixels. Reportedly, the motivation is to provide displays that look distinctly better than the "commodity"
SXGA (1280x1024 ) AMLCDs being produced by Taiwan's aggressive new AMLCD fabs while avoiding the higher cost and addressing
challenges of UXGA (1600x1200).
SID 2000 also gave the Society for Information Display an opportunity to install its new officers and committee chairs. New President Aris
Silzars (Northlight Displays) promised to build on predecessor Tony Lowe's achievements, and aggressively expand the society's role and
membership in the international display design, manufacturing, and product integration communities.
The Society for Information Display is an international society devoted to the advancement of display technology, manufacturing, and applications,
with headquarters at 31 East Julian Street, San Jose, California 95112.
