OLED TV

What in the world is an OLED TV? Even for the relatively tech savvy, it’s a bit of a head scratcher. Does it have anything to do with oleo? Is it some sort of major typo for OLD televisions? Well, if you are thinking old and imagining those antiquated, wood grained, energy sucking, behemoths, that took up most of the square footage in your family room you could not be further from the truth. The fact is that OLED televisions, organic light emitting diode televisions to be exact, are the televisions of the very near future.

Technology is barrelling along, and both LCD’s and plasma televisions, the “it” technologies are about to be the aforementioned antiquated, behemoths, in the family room. OLED technology is far superior in so many different aspects, but it all comes down to one simple thing that put it ahead of the pack- backlighting.

Backlighting is crucially essential to the LCD’s operation. Without it, there is no way for the LCD to display anything at all, but it is the most common failure point. With most, if not all, LCD’s being user inaccessible; there are only really two choices. You can hire out an expensive repairman for several hundreds of dollars, or you can allow your defunct 3000 dollar television to hang on your wall as an expensive piece of abstract modern art. With the new OLED technology, there is no backlight to fail. Also, because there is no backlight to power up, operational costs are substantially slashed. This makes the new OLED technology both greener for the environment as well as your wallet.

Without a backlight, the profile of an OLED television is much, much thinner than its comparable LCD or plasma counterpoint. The thickness can be taken down from inches to mere millimeters. In fact, OLED’s can be printed on just about any surface imaginable. The applications for this technology mean that very soon, televisions will be nothing more than flat, flexible, mats that can be rolled up and put away just like a poster.

The thin film that supplies the luminescence for an OLED TV, is not only thinner than a backlight, it is also far more efficient because the pixels themselves actually emit the light. This important feature allows for true blacks (an LCD is never truly black because of the backlight) and vibrant, true to life colors that are the same no matter the viewing angle. There is no distortion even when the viewing angle is 180 degrees. Much better refresh rates are seen with this newer technology, and the fasted LCD at 2ms is crushed by the blazingly fast rates of less than .01 that the OLED delivers. That’s 200 times better.

There are a few companies who are ready and willing to bring OLED televisions into the family rooms of the masses. Samsung, the front runner in the OLED industry, recently displayed both the first foldable screen made thinner than ever before seen, and the largest OLED television with an impressive 40 inch viewing area, the largest screen that the current technology can support. While Sony debuted the technology in 2004 with a PDA or personal digital assistant released only in Japan, they only recently unveiled its television application with a 21 inch screen in April of 2009.

The OLED TV is thinner, brighter, more portable and more energy efficient are about to make both LCD’s and plasma televisions a thing of the past.