I-Zone and Best-in-Show Winners
The Society for Information Display honored six exhibiting companies at Display Week 2014 in San Diego last June. These companies were Ostendo Technologies for best prototype in the Innovation Zone and AUO, BOE, GroGlass, LG Display, and Nanosys for Best-in-Show winners on the main exhibit floor.
by Jenny Donelan
THE Society for Information Display created the Best-in-Show Awards, one of the most exciting aspects of Display Week, several years ago as a complement to its Display Industry Awards, which honor commercially shipping products. The Best-in-Show awards shine a spotlight on exhibited products at Display Week that may or may not be ready to ship. These products may even be prototypes, but they represent the immediate future of displays. Best-in-Show winners are chosen during the first day of the exhibition by members of the awards committee, who consider not only a product’s significance, but the way it is presented on the show floor.
The Best Prototype Award, also chosen on the first day of the exhibition, goes to the most outstanding product in the Innovation Zone (I-Zone), Display Week’s special exhibit area for early-stage technology.
This year’s winners, in both the I-Zone and the main exhibit hall, cover a range of sizes, from a tiny chip to a 98-in. TV, and incorporate technologies ranging from OLEDs to LCDs to coatings. We describe them briefly here and congratulate all the 2014 winners!
I-Zone Best Prototype
This year’s winner of the I-Zone award for Best Prototype at Display Week was Ostendo Technologies, for a novel display device called the Quantum Photonic Imager (QPI) (Fig. 1). This is a display on a chip that uses LED layers stacked on top of a custom graphics processor. The LEDs incorporate “micropixels,” each of which emits multi-color (RGB) light. The display provides a density of about 25 million pixels per square inch and enables power-efficient and ultra-compact displays and projectors, with application potential in mobile (including wearable) displays, automobile head-up displays, and glasses-free full-parallax 3-D light-field displays. A 2-D version of the chip is scheduled to ship by Q4 2015 and a 3-D version sometime later based on customer demand.
Fig. 1: Ostendo Technologies’ Quantum Photonic Imager (QPI) is designed to enable a multitude of high-resolution applications, both 2-D and 3-D.
Best-in-Show Winners
Five companies – AUO, BOE, GroGlass, LG Display, and Nanosys – won Best-in-Show awards at Display Week 2014. These awards are presented in three categories: large, medium, and small exhibits.
Large Exhibit Category: BOE Technology Group won an award in the Large Exhibit Category for its 8K × 4K QUHD (quad ultra-high-definition display) (Fig. 2). This 98-in. LCD has a resolution of 7680 × 4320 and a brightness of 500 nits. This panel is designed to provide a very-high-quality immersive experience for viewers, based on its size, image quality, and color reproduction.
Fig. 2: BOE’s 98-in. LCD panel sports a resolution of 7680 × 4320.
LG Display also received a Best-in-Show award in the Large Exhibit Category for its UD OLED TVs (Fig. 3). LG has shown a real commitment to OLED TVs, as commented upon by roving reporter Steve Sechrist in his Display Week Review on TVs in this issue. Said Sechrist: “LG is expanding its OLED TV line-up and showed 65- and 77-in. curved UHD sets and non-curved OLED sets in its large booth at Display Week.” At the show, LG said the two larger sets were slated for commercial shipment later in 2014. The company also said it was moving to a more efficient curved AMOLED 55-in. set with a new FHD model (55EB9600) that incorporates a low-power approach. At press time, LG had just launched the new 55-in. set.
Fig. 3: LG Display featured a family of curved OLED TVs at Display Week, adding a 65- and 77-in. model to the 55-in. TV it had introduced earlier.
Medium Exhibit: AU Optronics Corp. (AUO) won a Best-in-Show award in the Medium Exhibit Category for its WQHD ultra-high-resolution smartphone LCD panels (Fig. 4). AUO’s 6-in. WQHD smartphone display employs AHVA (Advanced Hyper-Viewing Angle) technology and LTPS production and has a resolution of 1440 × 2560 with 490 ppi. Also adopting AHVA technology and LTPS production, AUO’s 5.5-in. WQHD smartphone display has a pixel density of 538 ppi, allowing for a more accurate presentation of Web content and sharper character display. The WQHD displays are designed especially to handle high-resolution video.
Fig. 4: AUO’s WQHD ultra-high-resolution LCD panel, in both 5.5- and 6-in. formats, is designed to empower the next generation of high-performing smartphones.
Small Exhibit Category: GroGlass won an award in the Small Exhibit Category for its AR-coated glass and acrylic that virtually eliminate reflection. The company’s exhibit at Display Week was a real attention-getter. The left-hand section of the display that incorporated the GroGlass product, as shown in Fig. 5, was so transparent it seemed like there was no glass whatsoever covering the butterfly. GroGlass offers its anti-reflective coating in sheets up to 124 × 88 in. The coating is made of multiple metal oxide layers that are applied to glass or acrylic. In addition, there is a special top coating that makes the glass or acrylic highly durable, more scratch resistant, and easier to clean.
Fig. 5: GroGlass’s coating (left) for glass or acrylic provides an exceptionally clear, non-reflective view.
Nanosys also won for its true-to-life display experience with high dynamic range and wide color gamut (made in partnership with Dolby). For Display Week, the two companies teamed up to create a first-of-its-kind 32-in. display that demonstrates the impact of Dolby Vision content by using Quantum Dot Enhancement Film from Nanosys (Fig. 6). The award winning display from Nanosys and Dolby features 16 F-stops of dynamic range, peak light output of 2000 nits, and DCI-P3 color-gamut coverage – all without drawing significantly more power than a standard TV, thanks to the quantum-dot-enhanced backlight. TVs featuring Dolby Vision technology are expected to be available for retail purchase later this year. •
Fig. 6: Quantum Dot Enhancement Film from Nanosys is being used to enable Dolby Vision, a new content platform that will be commercially available later this year.