Flexible, Color OLED Screens For E-Readers

nadiskafadi writes "Taiwanese researchers have shown off several flexible display technologies in an endeavor to promote e-readers and e-paper. One of the newest technologies from the Industrial Technology Research Institute was a flexible 4.1-inch color OLED (organic light emitting diode) display, which it claims is for the next era of portable devices."

Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E.

[Fallen Seraph]

There's something noticeably absent from that list: the Moon. The moon was mankind's primary source of light before the advent of fire, and the moon can be very bright at times. Yet the moon's light is entirely composed of reflected light. The poster above you is correct: light is light, irrespective of the source. The key aspect is how bright the light is. Staring at the sun is bad, not because it's a light source, but because it's a POWERFUL light source which is much brighter than our eyes are capable of handling directly. With many modern devices, brightness can be varied for increased eye comfort and reduced strain.

That being said, the issue is that, often, reducing brightness also reduces contrast on light emitting devices. And when the brightness is high, it can wash out the darker colors, and make details hard to see because the light overwhelms it. Thus E-Ink is useful not because it's not a light source, but because it is a low brightness (when reading under reflected light) high contrast display, which uses almost no energy when the display is static, making it perfect for long-term reading.

Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E.

[Bigjeff5]

Anybody who knows how flourescent bulbs actually work will tell you that the gas inside becomes a plasma. As a plasma, the gas conducts electricity, which pretty much precludes it from being an arc of electricity (though it does start as an arc, it's complicated).

To create an arc, the electric current must make a jump from a conductive electrode across a non-conductive space to another conductive electrode. The electricity super-heats the gas as it makes the jump, causing it to glow. This process actually does produce small amounts of plasma, but an arc lamp maintains the arc, while a flourescent lamp maintains the plasma. Arc lamps, I believe, tend to be a lot more power hungry than flourescents, because once in the plasma state much less electricity is needed to maintain the flourescent lamp. The gas in an arc lamp is always non-conductive, while the gas in a flourescent lamp becomes conductive. See?

A failing ballast may well produce a relatively constant arc of electricity by creating irregular spikes in current, which don't allow the plasma to fully form, but this is not the same as what happens in a functioning flourescent lamp.