Nothing about this seems plausible to me. I do research on LED technologies though I can't speak about this specifically because they don't seem to have released any technical details whatsoever, but that's part of what makes me so skeptical. The panels they present are so bright, so uniform (both in colour and intensity), so thin and flexible–and they claim they'll be able to mass produce them too? Whatever they've got, I'd be very surprised if they manage to scale it, let alone for it to be "in the wild around the middle of 2015". I'd be very happy to be proven wrong of course!
I think in cases like this photoshop mockups (assuming that's what they are) can do more harm than good for setting expectations that might not be realistic.
We also develop since 2.5 years a thin backlight LED lighting technology and do observe the market closely.
I am in the same boat here with lots of skepticism at least comparing to the photoshop pictures and expectations set. As the articles says it is some ink combined with LED lights, which will require some thickness as there is a silicon, die attach, some sort of bonding and a base carrier.
http://www.businessinsider.com/lightpaper-technology-prints-...
With the thickness of the material thin as paper there is very limited optical scattering possible, which would require enormous amount of LEDs to compensate for. To me something does not add up here or it is truly a revolutionary technology, but I do know from our optical simulations ink printing alone won’t make that possible.
Thank you for writing this. I think the skepticism of HN is what keeps me coming back. My (more or less) ignorant perspective on so many topics is offset by comments like these, which without, I'd have nothing to temper the marketing material within the links themselves.
Agreed. Although LEDs are far more efficient than incandescent bulbs, they still produce a non-trivial amount of heat. Almost all useful LEDs have some form of heat sink (for a flashlight, it can be a substantial block of aluminum, for a through-hole LED, it is the leads). Without some sort of a solid, heat-distributing backing, I cannot figure out what they would do with the heat produced by these.
As an example, I have a big-ass LED flashlight (google trustfire tr-j20). It gets extremely hot to the touch, and it has a massive heat sink.
They can scatter light and are deceptively thin. Coupling with (maybe) some fibre cables and you've pretty much got what they're offering. I'd doubt they're actually offering a unique product that illuminates the product as advertised.
LCD panels don't have a paper thin backlight, they are lit from the sides of the display and the light is refracted and diffused trough a thin layer of plastic, this is why all LCD's have light bleed to some degree since the diffusion is not uniform throughout the surface of the display.
This technology seems to be completely different and the LED's are infused evenly throughout the material rather than being simply located at the edges. The diodes they use also seem to be very different than commercially available LED's both in terms of their size(several orders of magnitude smaller) and resisting/allowing deformation without functional issues.
As it's currently shown this technology is much more similar to OLED and other internally illuminating displays rather than to LCD's, or traditional LED array displays.
The shot of the Audi logo matching the brightness of the LED DTRs made me pause. I'm not holding my breath, but I do hope they can deliver. If it's as good as they claim, it actually could change the way we do lighting.
Maybe it's an AMOLED-like tech with pre-configured drivers? e.g. instead of software driving the display, when the switch is flipped to on the entire surface goes ALL ON
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Nothing about this seems plausible to me. I do research on LED technologies though I can't speak about this specifically because they don't seem to have released any technical details whatsoever, but that's part of what makes me so skeptical. The panels they present are so bright, so uniform (both in colour and intensity), so thin and flexible–and they claim they'll be able to mass produce them too? Whatever they've got, I'd be very surprised if they manage to scale it, let alone for it to be "in the wild around the middle of 2015". I'd be very happy to be proven wrong of course!
I think in cases like this photoshop mockups (assuming that's what they are) can do more harm than good for setting expectations that might not be realistic.
We also develop since 2.5 years a thin backlight LED lighting technology and do observe the market closely. I am in the same boat here with lots of skepticism at least comparing to the photoshop pictures and expectations set. As the articles says it is some ink combined with LED lights, which will require some thickness as there is a silicon, die attach, some sort of bonding and a base carrier. http://www.businessinsider.com/lightpaper-technology-prints-... With the thickness of the material thin as paper there is very limited optical scattering possible, which would require enormous amount of LEDs to compensate for. To me something does not add up here or it is truly a revolutionary technology, but I do know from our optical simulations ink printing alone won’t make that possible.
Thank you for writing this. I think the skepticism of HN is what keeps me coming back. My (more or less) ignorant perspective on so many topics is offset by comments like these, which without, I'd have nothing to temper the marketing material within the links themselves.
Agreed. Although LEDs are far more efficient than incandescent bulbs, they still produce a non-trivial amount of heat. Almost all useful LEDs have some form of heat sink (for a flashlight, it can be a substantial block of aluminum, for a through-hole LED, it is the leads). Without some sort of a solid, heat-distributing backing, I cannot figure out what they would do with the heat produced by these.
As an example, I have a big-ass LED flashlight (google trustfire tr-j20). It gets extremely hot to the touch, and it has a massive heat sink.
My guess is they've simply using the backlights of LCD panels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiejNAUwcQ8#t=34
They can scatter light and are deceptively thin. Coupling with (maybe) some fibre cables and you've pretty much got what they're offering. I'd doubt they're actually offering a unique product that illuminates the product as advertised.
LCD panels don't have a paper thin backlight, they are lit from the sides of the display and the light is refracted and diffused trough a thin layer of plastic, this is why all LCD's have light bleed to some degree since the diffusion is not uniform throughout the surface of the display. This technology seems to be completely different and the LED's are infused evenly throughout the material rather than being simply located at the edges. The diodes they use also seem to be very different than commercially available LED's both in terms of their size(several orders of magnitude smaller) and resisting/allowing deformation without functional issues. As it's currently shown this technology is much more similar to OLED and other internally illuminating displays rather than to LCD's, or traditional LED array displays.
The shot of the Audi logo matching the brightness of the LED DTRs made me pause. I'm not holding my breath, but I do hope they can deliver. If it's as good as they claim, it actually could change the way we do lighting.
Maybe it's an AMOLED-like tech with pre-configured drivers? e.g. instead of software driving the display, when the switch is flipped to on the entire surface goes ALL ON