Based on a technology called organic light-emitting diodes, the prototype screen was unveiled by Eastman Kodak and Sanyo Electric at the annual conference of the Society of Information Display, the industry's top professional group. They also take less power to run, offer higher contrast, look equally bright from all angles and have the potential to be much cheaper to manufacture than their conventional counterparts. These advantages, especially the ability to handle video, give the upstart technology the inside track to become the screen of choice for the coming third generation of mobile phones. These wireless Web phones are expected to quickly become a multibillion-dollar global business. This promise has fired the imaginations of scientists and engineers and spurred a worldwide race to develop the technology that pits startups against heavyweights such as Kodak and Sanyo.
Difficult problems remain to be solved before the promise can be realized.
But the potential is too great for some savvy technology companies to ignore. If ever a technology has begged to be disrupted, it is liquid crystal displays. Indeed, they account for as much as a third of the cost of a laptop, and the failure to bring down the price of portables as dramatically as the price of personal computers has been due largely to the inability to simplify display-screen production. Perhaps the remarkable thing about liquid crystal displays is not that they are so expensive but that, given their technological complexity, they are affordable at all. The core of the screen is a sandwich of two flat sheets of glass a few microns apart, with the liquid crystals that form the display medium poured in between.