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Sony Shows a Genuinely New Kind of TV Display at CES, But It’s Not a Product

crystalledAs my colleague Steve Sechrist reported in a recent Display Daily, both LG Electronics and Samsung introduced their own 55-inch AMOLED TV sets at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) being held in Las Vegas this week. Both companies exhibited multiple units of their AMOLED TVs on the show floor to extremely appreciative audiences.
With both companies promising to sell such sets before the end of the year, is it too early to ask what might follow AMOLED as the even newer, even fresher large-screen TV technology?

What might appear to be the answer to that question was tucked away in the technology corner of Sony’s large exhibit space at CES: two FHD 55-inch CrystalLED TV sets. Although Sony had issued a press release a couple of days before, it was easily misunderstood, and the actual screen took display people by surprise. So what is CrystalLED? It is an emissive screen in which each pixel is made up of an RGB trio of inorganic LEDs. The screens looked great. In fact, they looked generally like AMOLED screens, which isn’t very surprising.

Sony representatives new very little about the screens they were showing, beyond what we’ve just said. They had no knowledge of how the screens are fabricated or what the cost issues might be. They were, however, emphatic in saying that CrystalLED is a technology demonstration and that there are no plans for it to be a product.

Now we know why. An extremely reliable source in the Asian display industry has informed Display Daily that the CrystalLED screen is composed of roughly 6.2 million LED chips (one for each sub-pixel) wire bonded to the appropriate pads. The result is a beautiful display, but it’s hard to imagine Sony building it in volume at anything approaching an acceptable cost.

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A practical inorganic LED panel does have attractions. It could solve the blue aging problem and consequent color shift that bedevils OLED displays. Inorganic blue LEDs are famously long-lived. (They are the emissive engines in all of the white LEDs used in the backlight of cell phones, notebook PCs, and LED-lit LCD-TVs.) They could also be more efficient, if miniature LEDs share the luminous efficiency of their large brothers used in solid state lighting.

kenwerner-0211So, are their ways of making an inorganic LED display that could be competitive in cost with AMOLED? Maybe. At least one other panel-maker has been looking at the problem and considering how inorganic LEDs could be placed on a glass substrate in economical ways. Wire bonding is not part of that solution.

Ken Werner is a senior analyst and editor for Insight Media. Reach him at kwerner@insightmedia.info

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