DISPLAY WEEK 2009 REVIEW/INDUSTRY DIRECTORY ISSUE August 2009 Official Monthly Publication of the Society for Information Display • www.informationdisplay.org Vol. 25, No. 08 COMMERCIAL TOUCH SUCCESS OF TECHNOLOGY FLEXIBLE AND ABOUNDS AT E-PAPER DISPLAYS DISPLAY WEEK 2009 EMERGING LCD PICO-PROJECTION PRODUCTS AND TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGIES IMPROVED OLED DISPLAYS Plus PROJECTION TECHNOLOGY BEHIND BEIJING'S SUMMER GAMES 2009 DIRECTORY OF THE DISPLAY INDUSTRY Journal of the SID August Preview COVER: The ambitious and spectacular opening ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in AUGUST 2009 Beijing, China, involved thousands of performers Information VOL. 25, NO. 8 and special effects and was enhanced with a non- stop panorama of digitally projected images on all suitable surfaces inside the “Bird’s Nest” stadium. And 147 DLP projectors were on-hand, all made and installed by Christie Digital Systems of DISPLAY Canada. 2 Editorial Looking Forward Stephen P. Atwood COMMERCIAL TOUCH SUCCESS OF TECHNOLOGY 4 President’s Corner FLEXIBLE AND ABOUNDS AT E-PAPER DISPLAYS DISPLAY WEEK 2009 A Very Intense Week Paul Drzaic EMERGING LCD PICO-PROJECTION PRODUCTS AND TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGIES 8 Display Week 2009 Review: Touch Technology Touch screens exploded in numbers and capabilities this year. IMPROVED OLED DISPLAYS Plus Geoff Walker PROJECTION TECHNOLOGY BEHIND BEIJING'S 12 Display Week 2009 Review: OLEDs SUMMER GAMES OLEDs seem poised to wrest some market share from dominant display 2009 DIRECTORY OF THE DISPLAY INDUSTRY technologies. Journal of the SID Paul Drzaic August Preview Display Week 2009 Review: LCDs CREDIT: Cover design by Acapella Studios, Inc. 14 2008 Beijing Olympics photo courtesy of Christie Digital LCD innovation continues to set the standard. Systems, Inc. Alfred Poor 18 Display Week 2009 Review: Flexible Displays The technology moves closer to “product” status. Next Month in Robert Zehner Information Display • Directory of the Display Industry OLED Technology Issue Information Display’s twenty-third annual directory of the display industry. • Commercializing AMOLED TV Jay Morreale • OLEDs: Promises, Myths, and TVs • Disruptive Nature of OLED Business 20 Display Week 2009 Review: E-Paper and Reflective Displays Ecosystems Momentum builds for electrophoretic and other reflective technologies. • Tablets in Digital Desks for Education Paul Drzaic • Journal of the SID September Contents 22 Display Week 2009 Review: Projection Pico projectors begin to come of age, and new projection technologies appear as well. Alfred Poor INFORMATION DISPLAY (ISSN 0362-0972) is published eleven times a year for the Society for Information Display by Palisades 24 Case Study: High-Power Projectors Illuminate Opening Ceremonies at Convention Management, 411 Lafayette Street, 2nd Floor, New 2008 Beijing Summer Games York, NY 10003; Leonard H. Klein, President and CEO. EDITORIAL AND BUSINESS OFFICES: Jay Morreale, Editor-in- In August of 2008, the world took in an amazing spectacle as the opening Chief, Palisades Convention Management, 411 Lafayette Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10003; telephone 212/460-9700. Send ceremonies of the summer Olympic Games unfolded. Display technology, manuscripts to the attention of the Editor, ID. Director of Sales: including projectors, played a major role in enabling this event. Michele Klein, Palisades Convention Management, 411 Lafayette Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10003; 212/460-9700. SID Terry Schmidt HEADQUARTERS, for correspondence on subscriptions and membership: Society for Information Display, 1475 S. Bascom Ave., Ste. 114, Campbell, CA 95008; telephone 408/879-3901, fax -3833. 30 Journal of the SID August Contents SUBSCRIPTIONS: Information Display is distributed without charge to those qualified and to SID members as a benefit of 32 SID News membership (annual dues $100.00). Subscriptions to others: U.S. & Canada: $55.00 one year, $7.50 single copy; elsewhere: $85.00 one The inventor of Trinitron technology dies at the age of 83. year, $7.50 single copy. PRINTED by Sheridan Printing Company, Alpha, NJ 08865. Third-class postage paid at Easton, PA. 36 Sustaining Members PERMISSIONS: Abstracting is permitted with credit to the source. Libraries are permitted to photocopy beyond the limits of the U.S. copyright law for private use of patrons, providing a fee of $2.00 per 36 Index to Advertisers article is paid to the Copyright Clearance Center, 21 Congress Street, Salem, MA 01970 (reference serial code 0362-0972/09/$1.00 + For Industry News, New Products, Current and Forthcoming Articles, $0.00). Instructors are permitted to photocopy isolated articles for noncommercial classroom use without fee. This permission does not see www.informationdisplay.org apply to any special reports or lists published in this magazine. For other copying, reprint or republication permission, write to Society for Information Display, 1475 S. Bascom Ave., Ste. 114, Campbell, Information Display 8/09 1 CA 95008. Copyright © 2009 Society for Information Display. All rights reserved. editorial Information DISPLAY Looking Forward Executive Editor: Stephen P. Atwood 617/306-9729, [email protected] by Stephen Atwood Editor-in-Chief: Jay Morreale 212/460-9700, [email protected] It was just a short 2 months ago when we all gathered in Managing Editor: Jenny Donelan San Antonio for the annual meeting that brings everyone in 603/924-9628, [email protected] the display industry together. As you are no doubt aware, Administrative Assistant: Ralph Nadell many people were not able to make the trip to Display Sales Manager: Danielle Rocco Week 2009 for personal or business reasons because we Sales Director: Michele Klein were in the middle of a very rough economic downturn Editorial Advisory Board worldwide. (If you happen to be re-reading this editorial Stephen P. Atwood, Chair several years from now, I hope you are appreciating the contrast between the better Crane/Azonix Corp., U.S.A. economy you are hopefully enjoying and what we were dealing with back in 2009.) Bruce Gnade Throw in a worldwide epidemic of the H1N1 virus and there was no shortage of University of Texas at Dallas, U.S.A. challenges involved in either holding or attending the conference. Allan Kmetz Similarly, most companies are challenged right now just by keeping the doors open Consultant, U.S.A. and salaries paid. But as much as we are all struggling with the present, Display Week Larry Weber was clearly about the future and provided a much-needed outlet for everyone’s Consultant, U.S.A. creative sides to emerge. From big companies to small start-ups, innovation and optimism were everywhere. If this event is a reflection of the face of the industry, Guest Editors then what I saw was an industry full of new ideas, constantly adapting to the market- Display Metrology place, and looking way beyond 2009 with high hopes for the future. Tom Fiske, Rockwell Collins, U.S.A. To give you a good picture of what Display Week 2009 was like, we asked a team LEDs of freelance writers, all names familiar to those of you who read ID regularly, to David DeAgazio, Global Lighting canvass the show and give us reviews of the most interesting things they saw and Technologies, U.S.A. heard. These are in many cases their own opinions based on years of experience in Ultra-Low-Power Displays their fields, and very enlightening as a result. SID President and regular contributor Rob Zehner, E Ink, U.S.A. Paul Drzaic covered three technology areas: E-paper, reflective displays, and OLED 3-D Technology technology. All manner of flexible displays were covered by Robert Zehner. Alfred Brian T. Schowengerdt, University of Poor tackled the complex field of projection technology, where this year’s small was Washington, U.S.A. the new “big,” as well as the incumbent world of LCDs, where big was still “big.” OLED Technology (Our own Jenny Donelan, with assistance from SID President-Elect Munisamy Julie J. Brown, Universal Display Corp., Anandan, provided a portion of the backlighting content for the LCD report.) We U.S.A. were somewhat astonished to see that over 25% of the exhibitors at Display Week LCD Technology were somehow involved in touch-screen technology. This almost escaped us and Shin-Tson Wu, University of Central prompted a late invitation to Geoff Walker, Product Marketing Manager for Florida, U.S.A. NextWindow, who graciously got on-board to help us cover this rapidly growing part Display Manufacturing of the industry. Working with this team and compiling their wonderful summaries Greg Gibson, NexTECH FAS, U.S.A. was an honor for us. I hope they add valuable context to your appreciation of the industry, whether or not you made it to San Antonio. We also bring you this month a very interesting behind-the-scenes story about last year’s opening and closing ceremonies for the Beijing Summer Olympics. If you had looked closely at the numerous and wonderful special effects going on during the cere- monies, you might have seen that projection technology played a major role and that there seemed to be an awful lot of projectors being simultaneously choreographed for the presentations. In fact, there were 147 DLP projectors on-hand, all made and The opinions expressed in editorials, installed by Christie Digital Systems of Canada. We were able to get the company’s columns, and feature articles do not neces- Principal Engineer, Terry Schmidt, to take the time to write about the entire process of sarily reflect the opinions of the Executive installing those projectors, as well as aiming, testing, and choreographing them into a Editor or Publisher of Information Display Magazine, nor do they necessarily reflect live show viewed all over the world. When I first discussed the article with Terry, I the position of the Society for Information had no idea how significant an undertaking the entire effort was, and while I do not Display.