xrox
05-26-08, 02:17 PM
Sounds like a thread from this forum: (mods please delete if already posted)
-------------- Blog from SID '08 (m******thal)
While few literally expect AMLCDs to truly capture the dominant market share that CRTs commanded for 30-plus years, there are some compelling arguments in favor of the position including the sheer size of the market ($84 billion USD in today’s dollars), state-of-the-art manufacturing, multiple solutions to very tough problems including contrast ratio and viewing angle, 120Hz refresh for motion blur, and LED backlights. However, the contrarian view maintains that AMLCDs have relatively high power consumption, extremely expensive fabrication facilities, and relatively slow response time. Furthermore, AMLCDs lack portability and the substrate glass is too fragile to make them useful in all applications.
With these competing points of view as the backdrop, more than 200 people gathered Tuesday night at the Wilshire Grand Hotel in Los Angeles to hear the Display Week Evening Panel address the stimulating and obviously hyperbolic question “AMLCD World Domination: Does Anything Stand In the Way?” Panelists from some of the most prominent display technology companies in the world represented several different camps and numerous perspectives, and Information Display Executive Editor Stephen P. Atwood filed this report:
Imagine being at the SID 2018 Symposium and hearing the committee announce that the number of parallel technical sessions has been reduced from a high of 37 to merely two: an Active Matrix LCDs to be held at Dodger Stadium, and an “Other Displays” session to be held at table 14, convention center lobby, next to Starbucks. This led moderator Roger Stewart raised the point that could we reach a point where there is no other development effort left except in AMLCD?
In his opening remarks, Fan Luo of AU Optronics noted that AMLCD is replacing CRT TV because of drastic improvements in weight, depth, and power, despite inferior visual performance, because of other important advantages such as weight, size, and power efficiency. Any emerging technology will need performance drastically better than AMLCD. Along with CRT, RPTV is also fading. AMLCD development trend is very dynamic and all major features improving rapidly. AMOLED TV will not pose a major challenge because it is only similar or slightly better than AMLCD, not better enough. AMLCD with LED backlight will make it comparable to AMOLED potential. AMLCD can reach 1,000,000:1 contrast with very low power consumption with dynamic contrast ratio. The thickness of the Samsung 40-inch LCD is comparable to an OLED at 10mm. Reported problems with OLED lifetime & differential aging, referencing a DisplaySearch report on the Sony XEL-1 OLED TV, indicates that OLED cannot meet the market expectations of consumer TV.
In his remarks, Norbert Fruehauf of the University of Stuttgart asserted that “AMOLED is the technology of the future, and will always be…at least for many years to come.” Issues include burn in, differential aging, and a backplane process that is much more complicated than for AMLCD. AMOLEDS consume a significant amount of power in the backplane, and the amount of total power consumed is image content dependent. The question is, where or what is the market niche for OLED? The advantages of AMLCD already developed leave very little difference with AMOLED to take advantage of. Need similar market niche (killer app) like notebooks were for AMLCDs. AMLCD technology is much further ahead in the learning curve and it will take too much effort for OLED to catch up. Pick whatever characteristic you want, and with a very large market supporting the technology, you can spend a lot of money to improve that characteristic. AMLCD can be manufactured much more cost efficiently, although they are complicated, because of the maturity of the manufacturing know-how and investments.
Further supporting the AMLCD camp, Jun Souk from Samsung noted that 6 years ago, he took part in another panel discussion about OLED vs. AMLCD and declared AMLCD unbeatable then. Today he believes this is even more true as AMLCD enjoys 10x bigger market domination. LCD manufacturers admit their weaknesses and have worked hard to improve them, leveraging their strong infrastructure built up over 20 years. LCD costs continue to come down, and are much lower than PDP. Performance and cost improvements continue. Momentum continues to build. PDP power efficiency is still 2 lumens/watt, the same since 2002. A 4 lumen/watt target widely discussed has not been achieved yet, with progress too slow and too late. There is a large cost burden to make full HD resolution PDPs, about $150 more over AMLCD. In some cases, AMLCD actually consumes LESS power than PDP, based on image content. LCD market share is 85%, while PDP has merely 9% overall, and OLED 0.6%. PDP still maintains dominance in > 50″ space, 60% vs. 40%, but AMLCD catching up. OLED always a “dream display” but time is running out for any success.
Defending the PDP camp, outgoing SID President Larry Weber explained that AMLCD plants cost way too much and this is their shortcoming. Sharp’s new Gen 10 fabrication facility will cost an estimated 380 billion yen to build. In contrast, Panasonic’s largest current PDP plant, P4, cost merely 180 billion yen and produces 500,000 units/month. The older P3 plant produces 250,000 units/month and cost considerably less. The planned P5 plant is estimated to cost 280 billon to produce 1 million units/mo. PDP manufacturing needs only class 10,000 clean rooms. The next point is market recognition: If you think you can claim world domination, you should be able to win the CES best buzz award. AMLCD did not win in 2008. This year PDP won for a 150-inch Plasma TV from Panasonic. Really thin OLED displays also were recognized. Thin is in! In fact, the first PDP, made in 1969 by Weber, was only 0.45mm thick, so PDPs can be made thin. Finally, Weber postulated that there has been a significant conspiracy against PDP folks lately. He believes the inherent physics of fluorescent lamps hold the key to plasma technology’s secret weapon. Fluorescent lamps can produce 80 lumens/watt. Weber believes he can get 40x improvement in PDP efficiency. But because he was busy as SID President for the past several years, he did not have time to work on the PDP power problem and this gave AMLCD a short-term advantage. This, he believes, was an LCD community driven conspiracy!
Consultant Fred Kahn argued that projection technology will persist and prosper. Kahn’s law of displays is that different applications will have very diverse display requirements - no one display technology will ever satisfy all applications, not even AMLCD. Projection offers many benefits: Highest image quality and power efficiency, most cost effective large-area display, extendable to larger areas and higher resolutions, flexible variable and novel formats, low weight and high portability, rapid improvements in light source technologies, longer life incoherent light sources, new applications and designs. For 113 years, projection technology has been filling theatres worldwide. Endless new innovations in public display, signage, micro/pico sized projectors, 20 Mpel planetarium projectors. There are a number of niche markets totaling $10 billion USD that will use projection displays and support the technology.
Mike Hack from Universal Display Corp. brought the discussion back to OLEDs, noting that the common elements in all the technology battles are power & money. If you ask “Why OLEDS?” the answer is because of the power reduction potential. Green energy conservation demands new solutions. OLED has the potential to low cost with wide viewing angle, high contrast ratio, excellent color gamut, fast response time, wide temp range, light weight, THIN, bendable, flexible, transparent. For portable devices, every 0.1 mm is important. OLEDs can fill the market for applications where AMLCD can’t serve. Power consumption improvement of 4:1 over today’s situation for a 2.8-inch display was shown, due to structure and phosphor improvements, Power = Heat. AMLCD requires “always on” operation of the backlight. AMOLED varies power with the number of pixels “on.” AMLCD technology is currently limited on its best possible power consumption, whereas OLED technology can be inherently improved over time. OLED has an intrinsically higher dark contrast ratio than LCD.
HK Chung from Samsung SDI then quoted Rolf Jenson’s 1999 book, The Dream Society: “The world is changing from an Information Society to the Dream society,” to assert that people want an emotional display! In the dream society, people make decisions by their hearts rather than their brains. What will be the best display in the dream society? It must be Eco-Friendly. LCD requires too many components. CCFL BLU contains mercury, which is believed to be a major health risk. LCD asks consumers to pay more for covering up their deficiencies. Motion Blur improvements such as 120Hz raises the price by $500 - $1,400. “Who do they think they are?” Chung asked.
Fan Luo noted that Sony is charging $2500 for a 10-inch OLED panel. Fred Kahn noted that projection is the best green display, and are much more compact and easier to dispose of. Larry Weber asked about exploding mercury lamps, to which Kahn replied, that most lamps offer long life with very small amounts of mercury. He also noted ambient rejecting screens and variable settings for luminance and color gamut tradeoffs.
From the audience, consultant Chris King asked about how dynamic backlights change the power efficiency assumptions Mike Hack made in his remarks. Hack noted it does make an improvement, but still not as much as OLED is capable of.
Roger Stewart brought up the issue of addressable LED backlights, and how that seems to be creating a redundant display system. There were various answers leading back to the economics of performance improvements in AMLCD are still stronger than OLED.
Discussion ensued about frame sequential color and how that might impact competing technologies. Larry Weber noted how sensitive observers can be to frame breakup once they are made aware of it, while Fred Kahn noted that projection technology now uses 6x or higher frame rates and has very high market acceptance. From the audience, Pete Baron noted that dark ambients under high contrast make the problem most noticeable, making this solution very unlikely for wide adoption in television applications.
Alix Paultre of ECN Magazine asked about how much of the shrinkage in projection technology sales is due to obsolete equipment such as CRT projectors, rather than consumer rejection of the technology. Fred Kahn explained that certainly the revenue numbers are going down. LCD manufacturers have done a very good job of marketing flat, thin, new designs driving consumers to make non-technology based choices, furthering the philosophy that “Since everyone is buying flat panels, they must be good.” Yet, plasma and OLED images are still better. In industrial markets, unit sales are still going up, but with prices coming down revenues are flat. In the education market, sales are actually increasing for projection.
Larry Weber follow-up up by noting that CRTs are dying out because they can’t be practically made in larger and higher resolution sizes, driven by HDTV demands.
SID President Paul Drzaic asked each panelist which technology each panelist had in their own homes. Stewart: a 50-inch DLP projector. Luo: an AUO LCD TV. Fruehauf: CRT TV. Souk: 52-inch Samsung LCD TV. Weber: 50-inch Plasma. Kahn: Sanyo front projector with 92-inch screen. Hack: 32″ LCD TVs. Chung: 3inch OLED TV and a 58-inch PDP.
The discussion concluded shortly with no clear consensus - you are not surprised are you? I’ll see you at SID 2014 for the rest of the story.
-------------- Blog from SID '08 (m******thal)
While few literally expect AMLCDs to truly capture the dominant market share that CRTs commanded for 30-plus years, there are some compelling arguments in favor of the position including the sheer size of the market ($84 billion USD in today’s dollars), state-of-the-art manufacturing, multiple solutions to very tough problems including contrast ratio and viewing angle, 120Hz refresh for motion blur, and LED backlights. However, the contrarian view maintains that AMLCDs have relatively high power consumption, extremely expensive fabrication facilities, and relatively slow response time. Furthermore, AMLCDs lack portability and the substrate glass is too fragile to make them useful in all applications.
With these competing points of view as the backdrop, more than 200 people gathered Tuesday night at the Wilshire Grand Hotel in Los Angeles to hear the Display Week Evening Panel address the stimulating and obviously hyperbolic question “AMLCD World Domination: Does Anything Stand In the Way?” Panelists from some of the most prominent display technology companies in the world represented several different camps and numerous perspectives, and Information Display Executive Editor Stephen P. Atwood filed this report:
Imagine being at the SID 2018 Symposium and hearing the committee announce that the number of parallel technical sessions has been reduced from a high of 37 to merely two: an Active Matrix LCDs to be held at Dodger Stadium, and an “Other Displays” session to be held at table 14, convention center lobby, next to Starbucks. This led moderator Roger Stewart raised the point that could we reach a point where there is no other development effort left except in AMLCD?
In his opening remarks, Fan Luo of AU Optronics noted that AMLCD is replacing CRT TV because of drastic improvements in weight, depth, and power, despite inferior visual performance, because of other important advantages such as weight, size, and power efficiency. Any emerging technology will need performance drastically better than AMLCD. Along with CRT, RPTV is also fading. AMLCD development trend is very dynamic and all major features improving rapidly. AMOLED TV will not pose a major challenge because it is only similar or slightly better than AMLCD, not better enough. AMLCD with LED backlight will make it comparable to AMOLED potential. AMLCD can reach 1,000,000:1 contrast with very low power consumption with dynamic contrast ratio. The thickness of the Samsung 40-inch LCD is comparable to an OLED at 10mm. Reported problems with OLED lifetime & differential aging, referencing a DisplaySearch report on the Sony XEL-1 OLED TV, indicates that OLED cannot meet the market expectations of consumer TV.
In his remarks, Norbert Fruehauf of the University of Stuttgart asserted that “AMOLED is the technology of the future, and will always be…at least for many years to come.” Issues include burn in, differential aging, and a backplane process that is much more complicated than for AMLCD. AMOLEDS consume a significant amount of power in the backplane, and the amount of total power consumed is image content dependent. The question is, where or what is the market niche for OLED? The advantages of AMLCD already developed leave very little difference with AMOLED to take advantage of. Need similar market niche (killer app) like notebooks were for AMLCDs. AMLCD technology is much further ahead in the learning curve and it will take too much effort for OLED to catch up. Pick whatever characteristic you want, and with a very large market supporting the technology, you can spend a lot of money to improve that characteristic. AMLCD can be manufactured much more cost efficiently, although they are complicated, because of the maturity of the manufacturing know-how and investments.
Further supporting the AMLCD camp, Jun Souk from Samsung noted that 6 years ago, he took part in another panel discussion about OLED vs. AMLCD and declared AMLCD unbeatable then. Today he believes this is even more true as AMLCD enjoys 10x bigger market domination. LCD manufacturers admit their weaknesses and have worked hard to improve them, leveraging their strong infrastructure built up over 20 years. LCD costs continue to come down, and are much lower than PDP. Performance and cost improvements continue. Momentum continues to build. PDP power efficiency is still 2 lumens/watt, the same since 2002. A 4 lumen/watt target widely discussed has not been achieved yet, with progress too slow and too late. There is a large cost burden to make full HD resolution PDPs, about $150 more over AMLCD. In some cases, AMLCD actually consumes LESS power than PDP, based on image content. LCD market share is 85%, while PDP has merely 9% overall, and OLED 0.6%. PDP still maintains dominance in > 50″ space, 60% vs. 40%, but AMLCD catching up. OLED always a “dream display” but time is running out for any success.
Defending the PDP camp, outgoing SID President Larry Weber explained that AMLCD plants cost way too much and this is their shortcoming. Sharp’s new Gen 10 fabrication facility will cost an estimated 380 billion yen to build. In contrast, Panasonic’s largest current PDP plant, P4, cost merely 180 billion yen and produces 500,000 units/month. The older P3 plant produces 250,000 units/month and cost considerably less. The planned P5 plant is estimated to cost 280 billon to produce 1 million units/mo. PDP manufacturing needs only class 10,000 clean rooms. The next point is market recognition: If you think you can claim world domination, you should be able to win the CES best buzz award. AMLCD did not win in 2008. This year PDP won for a 150-inch Plasma TV from Panasonic. Really thin OLED displays also were recognized. Thin is in! In fact, the first PDP, made in 1969 by Weber, was only 0.45mm thick, so PDPs can be made thin. Finally, Weber postulated that there has been a significant conspiracy against PDP folks lately. He believes the inherent physics of fluorescent lamps hold the key to plasma technology’s secret weapon. Fluorescent lamps can produce 80 lumens/watt. Weber believes he can get 40x improvement in PDP efficiency. But because he was busy as SID President for the past several years, he did not have time to work on the PDP power problem and this gave AMLCD a short-term advantage. This, he believes, was an LCD community driven conspiracy!
Consultant Fred Kahn argued that projection technology will persist and prosper. Kahn’s law of displays is that different applications will have very diverse display requirements - no one display technology will ever satisfy all applications, not even AMLCD. Projection offers many benefits: Highest image quality and power efficiency, most cost effective large-area display, extendable to larger areas and higher resolutions, flexible variable and novel formats, low weight and high portability, rapid improvements in light source technologies, longer life incoherent light sources, new applications and designs. For 113 years, projection technology has been filling theatres worldwide. Endless new innovations in public display, signage, micro/pico sized projectors, 20 Mpel planetarium projectors. There are a number of niche markets totaling $10 billion USD that will use projection displays and support the technology.
Mike Hack from Universal Display Corp. brought the discussion back to OLEDs, noting that the common elements in all the technology battles are power & money. If you ask “Why OLEDS?” the answer is because of the power reduction potential. Green energy conservation demands new solutions. OLED has the potential to low cost with wide viewing angle, high contrast ratio, excellent color gamut, fast response time, wide temp range, light weight, THIN, bendable, flexible, transparent. For portable devices, every 0.1 mm is important. OLEDs can fill the market for applications where AMLCD can’t serve. Power consumption improvement of 4:1 over today’s situation for a 2.8-inch display was shown, due to structure and phosphor improvements, Power = Heat. AMLCD requires “always on” operation of the backlight. AMOLED varies power with the number of pixels “on.” AMLCD technology is currently limited on its best possible power consumption, whereas OLED technology can be inherently improved over time. OLED has an intrinsically higher dark contrast ratio than LCD.
HK Chung from Samsung SDI then quoted Rolf Jenson’s 1999 book, The Dream Society: “The world is changing from an Information Society to the Dream society,” to assert that people want an emotional display! In the dream society, people make decisions by their hearts rather than their brains. What will be the best display in the dream society? It must be Eco-Friendly. LCD requires too many components. CCFL BLU contains mercury, which is believed to be a major health risk. LCD asks consumers to pay more for covering up their deficiencies. Motion Blur improvements such as 120Hz raises the price by $500 - $1,400. “Who do they think they are?” Chung asked.
Fan Luo noted that Sony is charging $2500 for a 10-inch OLED panel. Fred Kahn noted that projection is the best green display, and are much more compact and easier to dispose of. Larry Weber asked about exploding mercury lamps, to which Kahn replied, that most lamps offer long life with very small amounts of mercury. He also noted ambient rejecting screens and variable settings for luminance and color gamut tradeoffs.
From the audience, consultant Chris King asked about how dynamic backlights change the power efficiency assumptions Mike Hack made in his remarks. Hack noted it does make an improvement, but still not as much as OLED is capable of.
Roger Stewart brought up the issue of addressable LED backlights, and how that seems to be creating a redundant display system. There were various answers leading back to the economics of performance improvements in AMLCD are still stronger than OLED.
Discussion ensued about frame sequential color and how that might impact competing technologies. Larry Weber noted how sensitive observers can be to frame breakup once they are made aware of it, while Fred Kahn noted that projection technology now uses 6x or higher frame rates and has very high market acceptance. From the audience, Pete Baron noted that dark ambients under high contrast make the problem most noticeable, making this solution very unlikely for wide adoption in television applications.
Alix Paultre of ECN Magazine asked about how much of the shrinkage in projection technology sales is due to obsolete equipment such as CRT projectors, rather than consumer rejection of the technology. Fred Kahn explained that certainly the revenue numbers are going down. LCD manufacturers have done a very good job of marketing flat, thin, new designs driving consumers to make non-technology based choices, furthering the philosophy that “Since everyone is buying flat panels, they must be good.” Yet, plasma and OLED images are still better. In industrial markets, unit sales are still going up, but with prices coming down revenues are flat. In the education market, sales are actually increasing for projection.
Larry Weber follow-up up by noting that CRTs are dying out because they can’t be practically made in larger and higher resolution sizes, driven by HDTV demands.
SID President Paul Drzaic asked each panelist which technology each panelist had in their own homes. Stewart: a 50-inch DLP projector. Luo: an AUO LCD TV. Fruehauf: CRT TV. Souk: 52-inch Samsung LCD TV. Weber: 50-inch Plasma. Kahn: Sanyo front projector with 92-inch screen. Hack: 32″ LCD TVs. Chung: 3inch OLED TV and a 58-inch PDP.
The discussion concluded shortly with no clear consensus - you are not surprised are you? I’ll see you at SID 2014 for the rest of the story.