Government buyers have a sure bet these days with large-format LCD flat panel displays. With its high contrast and ease of legibility for text read at distances of 15-30 feet away, LCD is an ideal choice for command and control applications, digital signage, and high ambient light venues.
However, OLED (short for organic light emitting diodes), another flat panel technology, could be in a position to challenge LCDs dominance in a few years. And SED (surface-conduction electron-emitter display), a new take on an old technology, could build out its own niche as well.
LCD clearly dominates the market and will continue to in the short term of three to five years, said Chris Chinnock, president of Insight Media. As you get into larger size panels, historically you would have used more plasmas and projection systems. LCD has been making steady inroads into those larger sizes for a number of years and thats going to continue.
Big manufacturers like Panasonic and Sharp are pursuing LCD full force. Kevin Schroll, Sharps senior product manager, monitors, noted that plasma and LCD are the two predominant technologies for large format displays, but, at least today, Sharp only deploys LCD technology.
According to Schroll, Sharp thought LCD was a better technology to invest in 10 years ago. Its turning out to be true, especially for the professional market, he said. Digital signage, command and control for government-type facilities, there are more benefits with LCD as opposed to plasma.
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Plasma has a couple of drawbacks in the professional sector, according to Jin Kim, founder and president of DisplayBlog, an online resource for display research and consulting. Perhaps the biggest problem on the hardware level is burn in, however, he said manufacturers are able to solve the problem on a software level by shifting the image a pixel or two to prevent it from sticking.
In an environment with a lot of ambient light, such as an office or retail environment, plasma does poorly
. Plasmas stronghold seems to be the home television market. Some believe plasma shows a softer view of the image since its not as high a contrast, said Schroll. So when youre watching TV its more pleasing to the eye.
Manufacturers are adapting their businesses based on the market developments in favor of LCD. Panasonic, for example, is the dominant supplier of plasma displays. While they plan to continue to invest in plasma, they see the future is in LCD. As recent as last year, theyve worked out many agreements to not only get an LCD fabrication/manufacturing plant, but also to start aggressively manufacturing LCD TVs under the Panasonic brand, said Kim.
Leading the pack of potential new competitors in the flat panel market is OLED, with a response time in nanoseconds, compared to LCD, which has response time measured in milliseconds.
The best thing about OLED is picture quality, said Jennifer Colegrove, Ph.D., director of display technologies at DisplaySearch, a research and consulting group. There is no blur for fast moving videos such as sports. It is good for professional graphics people where the color needs to be true. Typically, OLED features lower power consumption than LCD because of its self-emitting design. LCDs power consumption is constant for the whole image, said Colegrove. The power is drained by the backlight.
According to Colegrove, OLEDs market forecast includes plenty of command and control applications, as well as videoconferencing because of its wide viewing angle. Presently, OLED is seeing a lot of practical use in small devices like cell phones and mp3 players, which use passive matrix driving.
The exciting thing is OLED is moving to active matrix for high resolution, high content information, added Colegrove. One example is Sonys 11- inch OLED TV that is in mass production now.
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