QD TV
Friday, 10th August, 2012Quite dinky? Quaintly discrete? Quality display?
No, it’s actually ‘quantum dots’! QD TV is set to revolutionise television-as-we-know-it. Even better than OLED, not only does QD TV give much clearer, brighter images than we have on the market today, the British scientists at Manchester University who’ve developed the technology say that it could be used to produce TV monitors which can be rolled up and carried in a pocket.
The tiny crystals, 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, can be printed onto flexible plastic sheets to produce a paper-thin display which can be easily carried around, or even onto wallpaper to create giant room-size screens.
They hope the first quantum dot televisions – like current flat-screen TVs, but with improved colour and thinner displays - are expected to be available in stores by end of 2012; a flexible version is expected to take at least three years to reach the market, The Sunday Telegraph reported.
Ordered a new flat-screen TV? Better cancel it!
Michael Edelman, chief executive of Nanoco, a spin out company set up by the scientists behind the technology at Manchester University, stated: “We are working with some major Asian electronics companies. The first products we are expecting to come to market using quantum dots will be the next generation of flat-screen televisions. The real advantage provided by quantum dots, however, is that they can be printed on to a plastic sheet that can rolled up. It’s likely these will be small personal devices.
“Something else we are looking at is reels of wallpaper or curtains made out of a material that has quantum dots printed on it. You can imagine displaying scenes of the sun rising over a beach as you wake up in the morning.”
But all is not good news for flexible display companies.Plastic Logic, a technology company which manufactured flexible organic electronic circuits and displays, has conceded defeat in the flexible e-reader race. The company, founded in 2000 as a spin-off from the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, was given a US$200-million financial boost from the state-owned Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies (Rusnano) in January 2011. But on 16 May 2012, the innovative company announced that it was abandoning its e-reader plans and closing its development plant in the United States. Instead, the company will try to sell its flexible-display technology to other companies that might want to use it in their own products (Source).
Other companies, like Polymer Vision, are still working on their own version of rollable displays so overall we may well be nearer to fold-up in-pocket televisions than we once thought!
