Forget curved TVs – you will be able to roll this one in your suitcase and take it with you on your vacations. That’s a promise that South Korean giant LG has just made to the world.
The company today announced that it has been able to create an 18-inch OLED panel that has enough flexibility to roll into a tube of 3cm radius without affecting the function of the display.
“This proves that LG Display can bring rollable TVs of more than 50 inches to the market in the future,” the company claims. That isn’t all – LG Display has promised that it is working on a 60-inch panel now, and it should be able to roll out the bigger rollable (pun unintended) panels by 2017.
“We are confident that by 2017, we will successfully develop an Ultra HD flexible and transparent OLED panel of more than 60 inches, which will have transmittance of more than 40 per cent and a curvature radius of 100R, thereby leading the future display market,” In-Byung Kang, Senior Vice-President and Head of the R&D Center at LG Display, said.
The 18-inch flexible OLED panel that the company unveiled today has an HD resolution of 1200 X 810 with almost 1 million mega-pixels. The panel’s curvature radius is 30R.
LG says it used high molecular substance-based polyimide film as the backplane of the flexible panel instead of conventional plastic, which afforded it the maximum curvature radius. In addition, the polyimide film helps keep the display really thin and really flexible.
The transparent OLED panel currently boasts 30 per cent transmittance (the transmittance of existing transparent LCD panels is around 10 per cent) – which means that the pictures look much better and less hazy. The company says it has lowered the haze of the panel which is generated by using circuit devices and film components to a level of 2 per cent.
Calling the tripling of transmittance and lowering of haze a ‘breakthrough development’, LG has significantly managed to improve the technology level of the transparent display.
