Samsung have announced a 21-inch single-panel, Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) display. The 16:9 panel offers WUXGA (Wide Ultra Extended Graphics Array) resolution, providing 1920×1200 pixels. Samsung claim it’s a world first at these resolutions. Seiko Epson showed a multi-panel 40-inch display back in May 2004.
OLED screens have several advantages over their LCD cousins, primarily the speed of their refresh (around 0.01ms vs 10ms), low power consumption (as they don’t need to be back lit) and a huge contrast ratio (50,000:1).
In December 2004, Sony and Samsung signed a deal to cross-license what they call “differentiation technology patents”, not their whole related patent portfolio. Our reading of this was “we’ve both spent a lot of time developing our own ideas, and realise that the other side has something of value which we can mutually benefit from.”
Having missed the trend towards flat screens, Sony have heavily committed to OLED as we covered back in September.