It’s getting harder and harder to find CRT monitors these days. vThe advent of liquid crystal displays (LCD) pretty much sentenced those old bulky CRTs to the landfill. Some creative individuals are coming up with alternative applications for the devices and a fish tank is a great example.

LCDs had a lot to offer compared to their over-sized counterparts, such as reduced radiation emissions and much lower drain on power. LCDs are also better for the environment by saving power and also saving space, since they are composed of much fewer materials, like plastic, metal, and glass.

Now LCDs are being overtaken by OLED – Organic Light Emitting Diodes. OLEDs are bringing the beneficial qualities of power and space saving to even higher standards. The actual thickness of an OLED is between 100 to 500 nanometers – that’s 200 times thinner than a human hair. This is made possible mostly by virtue of the fact that OLEDs don’t require backlighting to function.

Besides being thin, they are also flexible and can be rolled up to store when not in use. Some of the disadvantages of OLEDs are that costs of manufacturing are high, it can be damaged by water, and the different colored diodes have varying life-spans. The shortest of them is blue, which is at least three times less than that of red and green. To overcome this obstacle Sony is collaborating with Idemitsu to develop a higher level of internal quantum efficiency (IQE) and consequently increase the lifespan of blue. So far they have achieved a 3.5% gain in IQE.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 12:50 am and is filed under New Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.