The broad variety of displays included organic electroluminescent displays, driven either by low-temperature polysilicon thin-film transistors (TFTs) or continuous grain silicon TFTs. Others used power-saving thin-film diode (TFD) transistors. Lightweight plastic LCDs and high-resolution field sequential addressing LCDs were also shown. It's too early to know if one or more of these formats will emerge triumphant.

Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. showed a 2.2-inch active-matrix OLED in a 3G terminal prototype. The company doesn't plan to have the display in volume production until sometime in 2003.

The infrastructure of an established OLED industry is still coming into place, said Teruo Toma, director of the OEL business operation unit of Tohoku Pioneer Corp., a subsidiary of Pioneer Corp.

Tohoku Pioneer currently makes organic EL displays for use in car instrument panels and Motorola mobile phones, and the company also makes displays with continuous grain silicon TFT technology through an alliance with Semiconductor Energy Laboratory Co. Ltd. and Sharp Corp.

At CEATEC, Tohoku Pioneer showed a 1.8-inch CGS silicon TFT active matrix display with a 176 x 220-pixel panel, and a 3-inch panel with 320 x 320-pixel resolution. Both can display 260,000 colors. Samples of the units will be available in 2002. "Customers would not purchase even an excellent display if it costs several times a corresponding LCD," said Toma. "Once the infrastructure is established, the price can be lowered."

OLEDs will be competitive because they feature a simple structure and high performance, said Toma. Tohoku Pioneer intends to fabricate displays with driver circuitry integrated onto the display's glass. The company will eventually integrate drivers for other systems, Toma said.

Power consumption is a major hindrance of EL displays in mobile applications. Current prototypes eat more than ten times the power of similar-sized LCDs. Tohoku Pioneer has set a power consumption target at half the level required for an LCD with back and front light capabilities.

Sharp showed a line of CGS TFT LCDs that included a 2-inch model with a dual-mode display. In QVGA mode it features 200 pixels per inch (ppi) resolution with 260,000 colors, and in text-only mode it displays eight colors. "CGS technology enables us to fabricate drivers on the glass, [so] we fabricated two sets of drivers," a Sharp spokesman said. Power consumption is drastically lower in the text-only mode, he said.

"These are not only for mobile phones," the spokesman said. "We want to propose new usage of LCDs."

Sharp put LCDs into various forms at CEATEC, including a pendant, a bracelet, and a book-shaped portable HDTV with a 7-inch SXGA display. "We are showing the wide possibilities of LCD displays, hoping that new uses will flash into our customers' minds," the spokesman said.

Hunet Inc. (Tokyo) is backing field-sequential addressing LCDs because of their potential low cost, high resolution and low power consumption. These displays generate color not by dividing each pixel into separate red, green and blue cells, but by alternating those colors in a single cell. In this way, the same resolution of a color filtered LCD can be achieved with a third as many cells.

At the show here, Matsushita Communication Industrial Co. Ltd. showed a prototype 3G handset featuring Hunet's 2.6-inch color panel with 320 x 320-pixel resolution. "When cell phones become information terminals, high resolution will become essential," a Matsushita spokesman said.

The terminal included a zoom function that magnified the displayed text or image. The prototype featured 175 ppi resolution. To make characters easy to read on the small display, at least 300 ppi is desirable, the spokesman said. The prototype's resolution can be pushed to about 400 ppi, he said.

Casio Computer also showed a 3-inch field-sequential addressing display with 300 x 300-pixel resolution and an ability to show 260,000 colors, but the company admitted it's a work in progress. "Field-sequential technology can improve color purity and power consumption," a Casio spokesman said. "We are working on it, but Casio has not decide whether to market it or not."

Rather than stuffing pixels into a small display, Kopin Corp. has created two display for different uses. One can handle the relatively light task of showing text or still images. The second can show richer content such as movies that require VGA or higher resolution.

Kopin's liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCOS) micro displays are widely used in projectors, but CEATEC marked "the first time that a Japanese OEM displayed a [Kopin] microLCD," said John C.C. Fan, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Kopin. Sanyo built Kopin's products into a head-mount display prototypes and a mobile phone prototypes. "This is only the way to give VGA display capability to3G cell phones," Fan said.

Epson showed a 2-inch transflective color LCD using TFD transistors, and demoed it under illumination ranging from 0 to 10,000 lux. The picture quality was still high under bright light, though the viewing angle became narrow.

When displaying video, Epson's screen consumes 5 mW, but takes only 3.5 mW when showing a still image.