QLED thread (Quantum Dot LED displays)

QLEDs have been around for few years now, but it looks like only now a big player in the display market, LG, is interested enough to use them to make a new kind of display, which, on paper, looks better than OLED.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot_display
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/01/l...isplays-of-ou/
http://dvice.com/archives/2010/12/quantum-dot-led.php

The most crucial advantage over OLED that I'm getting from the info so far is that producing QLEDs should be far easier than making OLEDs. I'm not an OLED expert, but it seems like most of the problems with making OLEDs are caused by instability of organic materials while QLEDs replace most of them with readily available and reliable inorganic quantum dots. According to QD Vision, QLEDs won't even need glass substrates, and could be printed on pretty much anything, including flexible materials, and on large areas. On the Wikipedia page it says that QLED displays should be 50-100 times brighter than CRTs and LCDs. If this is true, then these displays will be able to do full-blown HDR video right out of the gate and without breaking a sweat! The same Wikipedia page mentions that 1000 pixel-per-inch resolution is possible. Not much is confirmed about refresh rate, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is similar to OLED's, since QLED seems like a more robust version of OLED technology.

Who is selling the largest OLED TV right now?

Several years ago LG was certainly not a leader in TV technology, but over the last year or so, it seems like they're on their way up and making some innovative products. That 31-inch OLED is a big achievement, no matter how much it will cost, especially with giants like Sony closing their OLED shop and Samsung treading water.

It's probably harder or currently more expensive to replace color filters with quantum dots. That's my guess. But if 50-inch QLEDs displays are demoed, maybe we won't have to deal with backlights, color filters and all that messy LCD technology altogether.

Interesting. It's a bit disappointing that QDs currently achieve 10K-hour lifetimes, which seems like the only known weakness of this technology, but if they're able to print large sheets of this stuff, then maybe it wouldn't cost that much to replace one sheet with another after several years.

Now, no, but 2-3 years from now, who knows?


I think 2 years ago I started a thread about OLED's death. Sure, OLED is alive and well in the 8-inch and under display market, but, as far as big TVs go, it'll remain as dead as SED.

Even though QLED should be equal or better than OLED at everything, by far the most important advantage is easier manufacturing and scalability as this would finally solve OLED's biggest problems--cost and limited size--which is why QLED has emerged as a real contender to retire LCDs and PDPs. The question now is whether this theoretical advantage translates into reality and soon. I'd say if LG doesn't have any QLED prototypes at CES 2012, it'll mean that QLEDs aren't that much easier to make than OLEDs.

Big companies don't want to invest in half-baked technologies that might fail in the end or in technologies too difficult and costly to commercialize, especially after spectacular failure of SED. Also, nobody wants to take a chance at investing in a new technology that has little chance to offer better PQ at much lower cost than LCDs. If there's little chance more money could be earned with a new technology than with LCDs, then what's the point of even trying to develop something new? So, in the end, it's up to these small companies to bare the whole burden of risk of developing a completely new technology in the hope of licensing it later to the big boys. The big companies expect these small R&D companies to hand them complete solutions on a silver platter, or they're not interested.

I've done some more reading on QLEDs and it seems like the difference between then and now is the improved chemistry of QLEDs that leads to greater efficiencies. While photoluminescence of current QLEDs is probably good enough already, it's useless for display technology. In order for QLEDs to be used in displays, they have to be really good at electroluminescence and that is something that has begun to be worked on in the last few years and current performance is lagging well behind what photoluminescence can achieve. From what I can tell, performance of electroluminescent QLEDs only recently started to approach OLED's but QD Vision claims that electroluminescence will end up as the most efficient way of generating light from quantum dots, far surpassing what OLEDs could ever hope to do, and it's just a matter of time before that happens.

Also, QD Vision and another company Solvay are going to develop a printing process for QLEDs.

So, with increasing progress on the QD performance front and likely ability to print QLEDs on anything on the horizon, LG apparently sees enough good things to think it's worth placing a bet on QLEDs, especially since they have experience making OLEDs and, theoretically, have all the necessary pieces ready to develop QLED displays.

Meanwhile, there are big plans to use the same quantum dots to improve LED backlights next year, which will not only bring a lot of attention to what quantum dots can do, but it should also drive the progress of making better, more efficient QLEDs.

http://www.ledsmagazine.com/news/7/11/16

Well, LG seems to think QD Vision has something of substance here. This technology has been around since 2002, but there hasn't been any real reason to get excited about it until LG became interested, which serves as a kind of validation that this technology is becoming mature enough to be worth pursuing. Considering how difficult OLED manufacturing still is, after years of trying to make it simpler and cheaper, it would be foolish for Samsung, Sony and the rest to ignore QLED.

The main issue that's crucial to the success of OLEDs or QLEDs in competition with LCDs and PDPs is the ability to print large panels on a massive scale. There's very little hope OLED or QLED TVs will be larger or cheaper than LCDs in the next decade until this printing technology is in place. I'm talking about roll-to-roll processing, similar to how newspapers are printed. This isn't possible today because there's no good way to print TFTs on flexible plastic sheets and to print OLED or QLED on them. But, technology that will make this possible is maturing quickly with QLEDs being better suited to be printed on flexible materials than OLEDs, which means QLED displays should arrive quicker than OLEDs, but, of course, if QLEDs succeed first, developing inferior and more expensive OLED displays will make little sense anymore.

So, if progress on the QLED front and flexible TFT panel front continues, around 2017 I should be able to buy a 180-inch QLED TV for $2000, take it home in a form of a 90x10-inch tube containing a thin, but durable roll of plastic sheet with QLED layer printed on it. Once home, I should be able unroll the sheet like a carpet, hang it on the wall and enjoy a nice HDR 3-D 2160p video. Development of super-light and super-thin wall-panel TVs (possibly transparent in the off mode) will probably be as big of a deal or bigger than transition from bulky CRTs to flat panels and everyone will want to have them. This development should not only kill plasmas and LCDs (imagine transporting and installing a rigid 100-inch plasma monster at home), but it should also kill all home front projectors (unless serious home-theater laser FPs show up in the next few years) and potentially cinemas.

That's true, which is why real progress should be measured by what manufacturers are actually showing at display shows and by how that translates to what's available on the market. If no QLED display prototypes are shown by 2013, we'll know QLED has serious problems.

New display technologies do take very long time to commercialize, but a QLED display wouldn't rely on a new display technology. QLED is basically OLED with fragile electroluminescent organic materials replaced by inorganic quantum dots. QLED to OLED is more like an LCD with LED backlights is to an LCD with a CCFL backlight, rather than how SED is to LCD. As soon as LEDs became efficient and cheap enough, they started showing up in LCD backlights immediately and this is what might happen to quantum dots replacing organic material in OLED displays.

Yup, transition from flat-panel TVs to sheet-panel TVs is going to be awesome.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/25561/?a=f
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/25940/
http://www.technologyreview.com/comp...3/?mod=related
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/25633/
http://www.azonano.com/news.asp?newsID=16375

All seemingly great advancements, but OLED has a long track record of failure when it comes to applying these manufacturing "breakthroughs" to commercial production. Samsung showed a stunning 40-inch OLED TV back in 2004 too. I doubt there'll be 50-inch DuPont-printed OLED TVs for sale in 2011 or even in 2014.