My friend Joshua was just mentioning OLED the other day. It came up in a conversation about Steve’s 10 year old Mitsubishi 33″ (I think) CRT which is going on the fritz. This was quite annoying as we were playing some GameCube games, as the screen would get brighter, then darker, etc. So Steve’s pondering what television to replace it with. We bandied about several ideas, but the main problem is that all display types have compromises of one sort or the other. So Steve will will have to make up his mind one way or another. Too bad he’ll probably have to replace it before OLED becomes mainstream, because it looks like quite a promising technology.

Samsung will be showing off a 40″ prototype OLED display next week. OLED displays consume less power than current flat panels, and offer higher resolutions than LCD displays.

Creating television-size panels is considerably trickier, but Samsung has begun to pop out these larger prototypes. Last year, the company showed off a 14.1-inch OLED panel with a resolution of 1,280 pixels by 768 pixels and followed that up with a 21-inch screen capable of high-definition resolution (1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels).

This latest prototype sports a 1,280-by-800-pixel resolution and a maximum screen brightness of 600 nits (A NIT is a measurement of light in candelas per meter square). The black-and-white contrast ratio is 5,000 to 1. The panel is 2.2 centimeters thick, and it can be fit into televisions that are less than 3 centimeters deep, Samsung said.

Link: News.Com - New Samsung panel pictures inch-thick TV