Australians are set to be the first consumers able to purchase Kodak's world-first digital camera with an integrated OLED screen, according to a company announcement.
Kodak today announced its latest consumer digital camera, the EasyShare LS633, a camera with an integrated OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) preview screen. The 3.1 megapixel LS633 will go on sale in Australia and New Zealand at the end of March at an estimated price of AU$899.
According to Penny Leith, Kodak Australia's local PR manager, the decision to launch the LS633 locally was due to buying patterns amongst digital camera consumers.
"Kodak's sales patterns from the smaller LS series cameras were strongest in the Asian region, whereas cameras with larger bodies sold better in the United States," said Leith.
It would likely be a number of months before the camera became available in the US, according to Leith, although she could not tie down an exact schedule for releasing the camera across the Asia-Pacific region. "It would likely be a matter of a few weeks between countries," she said.
Current digital cameras, including models from Kodak, use traditional LCD technology. The advantages with using OLEDs in digital camera displays comes primarily from the wider viewing angles available and lower power consumption of the non-backlit technology. Speaking via telephone from the Photo Marketing Association's trade show in Las Vegas, Willy Shih, President of Kodak's Digital & Applied Imaging group, said that the LS633 wouldn't be that much more battery efficient than existing models, primarily due to its larger display area.
Technology companies have recently been experimenting and developing OLED screens as a replacement for existing LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) technologies. OLED screens use an organic material that emits light when a charge is passed through it, removing the necessity for a separate backlight, as is needed in most conventional LCDs. The 2.2 inch OLED display in the LS633 comes about from SK Display Corporation--a joint venture between Kodak and Sanyo.
The LS633 uses a small molecule OLED technology. Small molecule OLEDs are developed by placing individual OLED molecules onto a screen in a vacuum, a time-consuming and costly process. Still in the process of development, is polymer-based OLED production, which would allow manufacturers to spray molecules onto a surface, rather than the single-molecule placement approach. Still, the camera is the first application of an active matrix OLED in a consumer product. It's expected that Sanyo will use the technology in a range of mobile phones in the Asian market.
Kodak also announced the EasyShare Printer Dock 6000, a combined camera dock and thermal-dye printer. The printer dock will be available in Australia in April at an RRP of AU$399. Kodak's announcement also included news of an update to its Easyshare computer software; version 3.0 of the software will be available for download in April.
LECs: Bright and efficient OLED
Source from ODSI http://www.odcad.com/
This is another buzz word. LECs means Light-emitting electrochemical cells. This type of cell usually has a mixture of a conjugated polymer, an ion conducting polymer, and a salt.
Its advantage over conventional OLED is that the cell has high brightness and efficiency at very low operation voltages broadly independent of the work functions of the electrode. The cell has emitting in both forward and reverse bias. The onset voltage is almost independent of the emitting layer thickness.
The following is the possible mechanism under external field.
Step 1. Salt dissociates into ions.
Step 2. Mobile ion drifts under field. Usually it has only one kind of ion that is small and mobile in the polymer.
Step 3. Cation moves toward cathode, anion moves toward anode. If only one ion moves, a balance charge moves another direction. Therefore, a junction due to electrochemical cell is build up in the polymer. When the junction is thin enough, the hole injected from the anode combines with the electron from the cathode. This results in emitting light.
One example given here is by Rudmann'[1] lab of MIT. A cell with structure ITO/t-butyl-Ru(II)+BF4+PMMA/Cathode. The t-butyl-R(II) is the charge carrier conduction channel. Here Ru(II) allows charge carrier transport by changing state from Ru(II) to Ru(I). Negative BF4 ion is the mobile ion. They have done capacitance, and current measurements that have solid prove to the model described above.
In addition to the advantage mentioned before, the electrode independence does give wide choice of material as electrode. This is particularly true for the cathode. However, there are a few difficulties for LECs technology. For example, the operation voltage schema, and its correspondence of the choice of mobile ion is tricky.
1. H. Rudmann; J. Appl. Phys., Vol. 94 115 (2003)
A group has been setup in Yahoo to discuss about this kind of technology. Join the group by visiting the site http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OrganicDevice/