INBOX:New technology is about to make our televisions thinner than size zero supermodels, just when you thought they couldn't get any smaller.
Ultra-thin TVs with brighter, crisper screens than current generation screens will go on sale in Japan from December.
And the first manufacturer to bring out these wafer-thin models will be Sony, which hopes the screen will reinvigorate its fortunes after it was slow to realise that consumers liked thin LCD (liquid crystal display) TVs.
The TV uses a technology known as organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) to produce images, resulting in a screen as thin as 3mm.
Sony is not alone in its pursuit of OLED TVs. Samsung has previewed a 40-inch OLED TV and rivals Toshiba and Panasonic are working jointly on OLED TVs, but are still in the research and development stage. Sony will be the first to market.
So how is it done?
An OLED is any light-emitting diode (LED) whose light-producing layer is made up of a film of organic compounds. Hence the "o" stands for organic.
OLED screens can be used in just about any place you can imagine, and have a great advantage over LCDs in that they don't not require a backlight to boost brightness. The result is much less power used.
OLEDs can be so bright they have even been touted as replacements to traditional light bulbs. They can also be made more easily than LCDs and plasma displays.
The one drawback is they have traditionally not lasted as long as other technologies. Sony's OLED TV will last for 30,000 hours, or about 10 years for somebody using the TV eight hours a day, but this is half the life of Sony's LCD TVs. However, the technology is improving all the time.
OLED TVs will also have to get across their advantages to a consumer market bamboozled by new television technologies. Today's market is flooded with options, including CRT, LCD, plasma, and four types of projection systems.
In the meantime, the advantages with OLED are obvious. The screens are much brighter than LCD TVs and have a better contrast ratio which gives you deeper blacks and even sharper pictures. They also display video about 1,000 times faster than LCDs, eliminating the blur in fast-moving pictures.
Until recently it was difficult and expensive to make large OLED screens. So Sony's first OLED TV, called the XEL-1, will cost €1,225 and has a small 11-inch display just 3mm thick. Weighing in at only 2kgs, it will have an amazing 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and display high definition TV at 1080p resolution.
OLED TVs are very unlikely to replace LCD and plasma TV overnight. For that to happen, OLED screens need to grow to at least 20 inches and above and come down a lot in price. But they look increasingly like the future of TV, so stay tuned. Literally.
