Among other firsts, Comdex marked the coming out party for the Walnut Creek, Calif.-based display products business unit of Eastman Kodak Co., formed last last month to help accelerate the application of Kodak's widely licensed organic light-emitting diode (OLED) materials.

"Kodak Rochester, N.Y. intends to widen its lead in the industry developing around display screens made from organic light-emitting diodes, or OLED, in such consumer electronics as digital cameras, mobile phones and car radios," said a company spokesman, who characterized OLEDs as "dime-thin sheets of glass that reproduce images with far more clarity than the conventional liquid crystal displays used in many electronic devices."

Kodak and its development partner Sanyo Electric Co. showed their latest 2.4- and 5.5-inch active-matrix (AM) OLED prototypes at Comdex, "paradigm-busting displays that promise — or threaten — to disrupt traditional market structures," said Ken Werner, editor of Information Display magazine (Norwalk, Conn.), a publication of the Society for Information Display.

Stanford Resources Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) said "the worldwide OLED display market is forecast to increase from several hundred thousand units, valued at $3 million, in 1999 to more than 100 million units, valued at $714 million, in 2005."

Liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) microdisplays typically measure less than an inch but present large virtual images to the eye. They may be disruptive, even if the close-to-the-eye viewing paradigm becomes widely accepted. "Solving the problem of delivering high-resolution images in mobile consumer products, wearable displays have the potential to be as common as cellular telephones are today," said Mark Willner, chief executive officer of Colorado MicroDisplay Inc. (Boulder, Colo.). "In mobile phones, they will deliver the last millimeter of content for 3G third-generation networks."

Finished models

Allan Abbott, president and chief executive officer of MicroDisplay Corp. (San Pablo, Calif.), sees "the beginning of a new era of personal display products for commercial and consumer applications such as portable computing, DVD movie viewing and gaming applications. For a virtual look into the future," he said, "visitors attending the Comdex show will see the finished models of Cy-Visor," a headset from Daeyang E&C (Seoul, South Korea) based on a MicroDisplay LCoS display engine.

Junuk Lee, president and chief executive officer of Daeyang, said, "Market growth for display headsets relies on the availability of high-resolution microdisplay that does not sacrifice picture quality, color, size or power."

Merging OLED materials with the "on-silicon" philosophy, eMagin Corp. (East Fishkill, N.Y.) gave its first Occidental showing of a 0.62-inch OLED-on-silicon microdisplay at Comdex targeted at consumer applications. (Earlier displays have been military-centric.) Intended for such applications as wireless Internet viewers, portable DVD players, camcorders and wearable computers, the microdisplay was designed "for low power usage at full video performance and a simple, low-cost interface for analog output," said company president and chief executive officer Gary Jones.

"OLED devices use less power than LCoS displays and are capable of high brightness and color," Jones said. "Because the light they emit is Lambertian i.e., appears equally bright from all directions, they are ideal for near-to-the-eye applications since a small movement in the eye does not shift the image."

Also getting its first U.S. showing was a large tiled liquid-crystal display (LCD) that Philips Components (San Jose, Calif.) has been developing with Rainbow Displays Inc. (Endicott, N.Y.) since late last year. "This marks the first time in history that any display manufacturer has publicly demonstrated the ability to cost-effectively create a large-scale AM LCD, both seamlessly and efficiently, while delivering best-in-class display performance," said Karen Hopkins, vice president of the executive office of Philips Components.

"The AM LCD . . . is made with three individual AM LCD panels in a 1 x 3 matrix that equates to a 37.5-inch diagonal configuration — ideal for standard-definition, wide-screen television applications," she said.

Also in the large-screen arena, Comdex was rife with the latest plasma displays, but much of the display focus at the show was on mobile equipment, a market that "continues to grow by leaps and bounds, especially with the emergence of Internet connectivity," Hopkins said. "The market demand for high-quality digital video performance is driving a shift from monochrome to color displays, and is forcing display manufacturers to improve upon their business models to keep pace with the myriad of applications now emerging," she said.

"I expect to find actual working examples of Internet Appliances at Comdex and more products using displays than ever before," Dale Maunu, director of marketing for flat-panel display products at Mitsubishi Electric & Electronics USA Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), said before the show. "I have been hearing that they are going to be the next big application for flat-panel displays, and will turn the current LCD oversupply into undersupply all by themselves. I have even heard some companies are planning to build as many as 1 million units per month of IA devices, and are trying to secure LCD allocation and pricing to support that figure."

"Anyway," Maunu said, "the IA products, with the amazing volume projections, should be proliferating at Comdex as that should be the time of the year for maximum run rates. Last year I saw the early MP3 players at Comdex, so I am guessing that IA will be the product this year."

Philips' Hopkins noted a trend in the mobile market for "increased functionality embedded in the display which serves to optimize the critical system space, performance and power requirements that are becoming increasingly stringent within today's emerging mobile, wireless technologies. We believe that the more functionality you can embed in the display, the less space you'll need for related electronics and interconnects."

Minding the mainstream

While newcomers to the display arena challenge mainstream devices for new and emerging applications, the mainstream is not, of course, stopping the flow. "On a more mundane note, the display products that are paying the salaries are notebooks and flat panel monitors," said Mitsubishi's Maunu. "Look for SXGA+ and UXGA resolutions in notebooks as a real trend," he said. "And look for the continued demise of smaller displays in notebooks, with 14.1-inch as the really dominant size and 12/13/15-inch being niche players."

As far as monitor displays are concerned, "I expect 15-inch XGA to continue to dominate, with price still being the key differentiation," Maunu said. "There is talk about making panels that are more appropriate for video/TV viewing with features like high-luminance, fast-response and high-contrast being touted. Unfortunately, the marketplace is dictating lower prices, not more features."

A hot topic at Comdex, Maunu said, was whether the rumors of coming price reductions on 17-inch SXGA LCD monitors to $1,000 by the end of the year turn out to be true. "If the $1,000 rumors are true, look for some turmoil as other vendors try to compete."

A spokesman for LG Philips LCD (Seoul, South Korea) said that Comdex demonstrated "the notebook market's inevitable shift from 12-inch and 14-inch display sizes to 13-inch and 15-inch display sizes," and pointed to an emerging "high-performance UXGA notebook display market, which is expected to materialize in the latter part of this year." Among other demos, the company planned to have "a stunning 29-inch LCD TV demo" on hand for the show, he said.

A new kind of model for the display business was also in evidence at Comdex. Hopkins said that Philips has, in fact, adopted an application-specific display philosophy "aimed at driving future customer product development. Essentially, we jointly develop displays with customers-producing a highly customized product that delivers greater value and functionality."

LCoS makers are also following the partnering route. "High performance, sleek, stylish and lightweight designs are now possible with reflective microdisplays through the use of innovative optics designs like those of our OEM partners like Olympus Optical Corp. and Shimadzu Corp.," said Colorado MicroDisplay's Willner.

"For example, the Shimadzu headset that is being shown for the first time at Comdex is the first practical high performance wearable display, the smallest and lightest high-resolution headset ever introduced. It enables a broad range of new and emerging products, such as wearable personal computers, e-book readers and pocket Web appliances, and sets the stage for the future of wireless computing appliances."