2007 SID Trends – “Let’s Take It Outside”
May 23rd, 2007By Dale Maunu, Vice President
And so it is that we find ourselves in sunny Southern California looking for trends at this year’s SID extravaganza. Over the years we have seen FEDs come and go, CRTs fade away, OLEDs threatening to become mainstream, LCDs and PDPs battling it out for the largest size, and most recently, the emergence of electrophoretics. This year, however, a fairly subtle, but consistent, trend is emerging: outdoor use displays. The techniques have been around for quite a while: transflective LCDs, anti-reflective surface treatments, high luminance backlights, and now the aforementioned electrophoretic displays. Transflective displays were reserved for handheld devices, and third parties typically enhanced an off-the-shelf display with backlights or AR coatings to make larger displays useful in direct sunlight. We now have the display makers taking outdoor use seriously by offering transflective displays up to 15” (NEC), 1,000+ cd/m2 luminance (NEC & Kyocera), 40” to 82” outdoor use LCDs for digital signage (Samsung), and electrophoretic displays (Samsung, PVI, and E-Ink). It seems that the outdoor ‘niche’ has grown to be commercially viable to the point that the major vendors are taking notice.
I thought I would be safe from this trend at the Adhesives Research booth: their booth looked harmless enough. I didn’t see any xenon lamps thrusting permanent retinal damage upon the unsuspecting. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It turns out they have an adhesive that is “Electronically Clean” for use in attaching touch screens to LCDs (among other things). It seems that one of the failure modes of projected capacitive touch screens is a chemical interaction between the ITO and the adhesive, which causes oxidation and, therefore, a change in the properties of the ITO. This failure mode commonly occurs when the device is used in a high temperature, high humidity environment such as outdoors. Their “Electronically Clean” adhesive does not react with ITO and is therefore suitable for applications that require a touch screen and may be used outdoors, perhaps in a mobile phone or GPS device.
As I write this on Tuesday evening, Day 1 of the SID exhibits, I am keenly aware that I have only visited about 1/3 of the booths, maybe less, and I may have a different impression after tomorrow. So far, it seems like the display industry is finally ready, willing and able to take on the great outdoors. Now if I could just get my cell phone to work indoors….
www.displaysearch.com