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News Release
Editorial
Contact
Dian Mecca
Tel: (203) 853-7069
Fax: (203) 855-9769
email: dmecca@sid.org |
For Immediate Release
|
SID Show
Thrives in Tough Year
San Jose,
California, June 2 - The final attendance numbers for SID 2003,
this year's edition of the Society for Information Display
annual International Conference, Symposium, and Exhibition,
which ended in Baltimore on May 23, took a few days to compile,
but the results confirm the feelings of organizers, exhibitors,
and analysts at the event. Although overall attendance declined
moderately to 5700 from 6500 in 2002, the number of exhibit
booths only dropped to 451 (from 474), and exhibitors were
generally pleased with the quantity and quality of their
contacts. The reduced attendance was frequently attributed to
the SARS virus and the weak global economy, but other trade
shows have experienced much greater decreases this year.
Analysts speculated that the robustness of the SID show
reflected the extremely strong growth of the display segment in
an otherwise lackluster electronics industry. This line of
reasoning was supported by an attendance of over 400 at the new
SID Business Conference, held on the Monday of Display Week.
Among the
technical trends apparent at SID 2003, the increasing speed of
LCD panels for television was particularly striking. Leading
manufacturers of LCD television modules and receivers showed TFT-LCD
panels with gray-to-gray switching times in the range of 10 to
12 milliseconds that go a long way toward eliminating the
smeared moving images that marred earlier generations of
LCD-TVs. Sharp, Samsung, and LG.Philips were notable members of
this group, with Samsung and Sharp promising even faster
7-millisecond panels within the next year. In general, the
latest speed increases have been accomplished by adding
intelligence to the driving circuitry that
"overdrives" each pixel to its next level using
knowledge of both the current level and the forthcoming one.
If the
proliferation of small OLED prototypes was a distinguishing
feature of last year's SID, this year's was a showcase for more
prototypes, ready-to-manufacture modules, and a few OLED-containing
products, including Kodak's EasyShare LS633 digital still camera
(which is available in Europe but not yet in North America).
Kodak also showed a 15-inch OLED demonstrator made by
manufacturing partner Sanyo, and Chi Mei's 20-inch OLED
demonstrator was shown on the IDTech stand. The Chi Mei OLED
used amorphous silicon TFTs, a hot topic in the SID technical
conference, because using a-Si opens the door to lower-cost
active-matrix OLEDs.
There were
interesting, and sometimes surprising, innovations at SID 2003,
including Toshiba's LCD that also acted like a small scanner
(with no moving parts); and the Philips scrolling-color,
rear-projection (RP) LCoS TV with five primary colors (courtesy
of Genoa Color Technologies). Philips also demonstrated the
impressive production version of its three-primary, 44-inch,
scrolling-color, 720-line, rear-projection (RP) LCoS TV. It will
go on sale in North America in August under the Cineos brand
name.
Sharp was showing
its autostereoscopic (no glasses) 3D LCD in a cell phone, which
is now a product. Sharp also showed its "Advanced TFT-LCD"
transflective display technology, which impressively maintains
similar color balance and viewability in dim room light and
bright sunlight.
Advanced booth
reservations for SID 2004 were held at the show, and the number
of reservations was the largest she could remember, said Exhibit
Sales Manager Joanne Morgenthal.
SID 2004 will be held May 23-28, 2004 in Seattle, Washington.
The Society for
Information Display is an international society devoted to the
advancement of display technology, manufacturing, and
applications, with headquarters at 610 South 2nd Street, San
Jose, California 95112. Website www.sid.org.
