Best-in-Show Winners
The Society for Information Display honored five exhibiting companies at Display Week 2016 in San Francisco last May. These companies were LG Display, Asahi Glass Co., E Ink Corp., DigiLens, and MY Polymers.
Compiled by Jenny Donelan
BEST-IN-SHOW is the most “holistic” award that SID bestows. The Display Industry Awards honor great products that have hit the marketplace; the Best Prototype award is for the most exciting, cutting-edge prototype in the Innovation Zone. Best-in-Show winners are chosen for exciting technology, whether pre- or post-market, and also for the company’s ability to showcase that technology. For example, this year the awards panel chose to honor Asahi Glass Co. not for a particular product, but for the way it showcased a range of products in its booth on the show floor. Great exhibitions help anchor the other exciting events at Display Week, and these awards recognize the effort that companies invest in making the exhibition such a success This year’s five winners were selected from more than 200 exhibitors at Display Week 2016 in San Francisco.
The Best-in-Show awards are presented in three categories of exhibit size: large, medium, and small.
Large Exhibit: LG Display won in the large-exhibit category for its high-dynamic-range 77-in. UHD OLED TV (Fig. 1) This display was stationed at the front of the exhibit hall this year and stopped showgoers in their tracks as they entered the hall. This was OLED at its best and biggest.
Fig. 1: Among the admirers of LG’s 77-in. HDR OLED TV at Display Week were Catherine Getz, Director of Design and Development for Elotouch Systems (left), and ID< magazine’s executive editor Steve Atwood (right) and his wife Linda Atwood (middle). Photo courtesy LG Display.
According to LG, high-dynamic-range (HDR) technology boosts the TV’s picture performance with near-perfect black and improved brightness. LG adds that OLED technology is well suited to HDR because it is self-emitting. It can show deep blacks and peak luminance at the same time because each self-emitting pixel can turn on and off independently. This capability also offers superior HDR video performance, says LG.
Medium Exhibit: Asahi Glass Co. (AGC) won an award in the medium-exhibit category for its unique booth presentation showcasing integrated display technologies. Asahi is well known as one of the major players when it comes to display glass. Its booth this year at Display Week showed to great advantage the many ways the company’s products could be used.
According to Asahi, it designed its presentation to showcase its expertise in glass, advanced chemicals, ceramics, and liquid-crystal-related technologies, as well as in combining these elements to create new types of information displays. Among these are a bus-stop kiosk using AGC’s infoverre, an information display directly attached to a glass wall (this appears on the cover of this issue), a programmable window shade, and the potentially interactive Glascene technology shown in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2: This interactive virtual concierge robot is an example of Asahi Glass Co.’s Glascene technology, in which an image projected onto a transparent glass screen becomes an interactive presentation through motion sensing.
AGC says that one of its goals is to convert glass areas all around us into information signage “because glass is used in every automobile or architecture.” The company looks forward to promising new markets based on the fusion of glass and displays.
Also winning in the medium-exhibit category was E Ink Corp., for its breakthrough color e-Paper display. E Ink, a company that is more or less synonymous with electronic-ink technology, announced its Advanced Color ePaper (ACeP) at Display Week 2016. This is a reflective display that can produce full color at every pixel without the use of a color-filter array (Fig. 3). (For more about this product, see the Materials Review from Display Week 2016 in this issue.) The initial target application for ACeP, according to E Ink, is digital signage.
Fig. 3: E Ink’s new color electrophoretic technology produces color without the use of filters.
Small Exhibit: DigiLens won in the small-exhibit category for its unique presentation of highly efficient holographic head-up-display technology. Although DigiLens’ Color MotoHUD display is an exciting head-up application in its own right, it did not hurt that the company’s booth presentation at Display Week offered attendees a chance to sample the MotoHUD onboard a (stationary) BMW motorcycle (Fig. 4). This was a very popular exhibit during the show.
Fig. 4: DigiLens’ Color MotoHUD display has been developed for BMW. Pictured aboard the motorcycle is Geena Dabadghav, IT Manager for MCA.
DigiLens notes that inquiries for auto-motive HUDs and wearable displays like the MotoHUD continue to grow. On the auto-motive side, it claims that the integrated nature of its optical platform enables the light transmission ratio for a wide-FOV windscreen AR HUD projector to be reduced from 30+ today down to under 2. On the wearable side, the company says it is committed to full production of the MotoHUD and is now finalizing designs for AR eyeglass displays.
Also winning in the small-exhibit category was MY Polymers for its low-refractive-index liquid optically clear adhesive with high bonding strength. The company’s LOCA-133 (Fig. 5) is distinguished by its unique combination of low refractive index and high bond strength.
Fig. 5: While the bottle may not look all that exciting, it’s what’s inside that counts. The LOCA-133 adhesive from MY Polymers impressed the Best-in-Show committee because it’s a low-index adhesive with strong bonding capabilities, making it useful for a wide range of display technologies.
Previously, according to MY Polymers, it was not possible to produce low-index adhesives with strong adhesion, and this limitation prevented their use in the display industry. Now, due to LOCA-133’s low index, the light remains contained in the light-guiding medium. This property enables improvements in various applications, including thinner high-efficiency backlight units, a minimization of light leakage in curved and flexible LCDs, improved light-based touch screens, improved autostereoscopic 3D displays (due to enhanced disparity between the two images), improved VR and AR headsets, higher transparency in nanotech-based transparent conductors, and improved light extraction from OLEDs.
Jenny Donelan is the Managing Editor of Information Display Magazine. She can be reached at jdonelan@pcm411.com.