Plasma Screen TVs - New Technological Developments
Date: August 6, 2004
Have you heard of OLED or NED? Maybe in a few years, these terms will be as popular as “plasma” as in “plasma screen TVs”. Plasma screen TVs, also known as plasma display panels or PDPs, uses emissive technology in that the display is created by electrodes charging the plasma gases to give off various colors. On the other hand, OLED or organic light emitting diode is self-luminous, which means that it gives off its own light naturally when an electrical field is applied to it.
Already, OLED displays are used on a small scale in consumer electronics. Kodak’s EasyShare LS633 digital camera has an OLED display, as does Philips’ 8894 XL electric shaver. However, it may be still a little while before the displays can be manufactured reliably at the screen sizes of today’s plasma TVs. Nonetheless, significant progress has been demonstrated by some major manufacturers of consumer electronics. Sony, for example, recently showed a 24-inch OLED display.
OLED’s advantages are that it is a highly efficient display because no backlighting is required, it is lightweight and can possibly be bent into different shapes while still producing an image (DuPont is working just such a display which it has dubbed “Olight”). Because no backlighting is required, OLED may eventually be cheaper to produce than plasma display panels.
Another promising technology is NED or nano-emissive-display. NED uses smaller display modules that, hopefully, will be cheaper to manufacture than current plasma screen TVs. But, NED is fairly new and not many people know about the manufacturing process outside of the very core of the television manufacturing industry.
What does this all say about plasma screen TVs and other current big-screen television technology? Many feel that the new technology will complement rather than compete against today’s current standards. Airports and large kiosk displays will continue to employ plasma screen and projection television technology. Moreover, lcd screen TVs will also simply increase the market for large flat panel displays. Regardless of the technology behind the picture, most people are more concerned about getting a quality television display product—and they have that today (and tomorrow) with plasma, lcd and rear-projection televisions and displays.
More articles at our Flat Screen TV Articles page.
