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Organic LEDs (OLEDs) breakthrough – luminous wallpaper is on the way, lights up your entire room

Researches at GE (General Electric) have achieved a breakthrough in organic LEDs technology, which allows the OLEDs to be printed on a very thin sheet of material, such as wallpaper. Meaning having this technology available in the market, you can get wallpapers for your apartments or rooms, which these wallpapers allow you to change its lighting patterns and colors. These will be best used during partying time or anytime you can change the colors to boost your mood.

The achievement of GE highly depends on if they’re able to manufacture these organic LEDs in a roll-to-roll basis, which works like conventional printing press. If they can incorporate the roll-to-roll method into their manufacturing process, then we’ll soon be able to get it in the market in a more affordable price. But according to one of the GE engineers, the technology still needs more adjustment and improvement to make it more practical for commercial production as it’s still little far from the practical to go in our everyday use.

One little hindrance that GE needs to look into in order to make it more practical is to perfect their roll-to-roll manufacturing process in lower cost manner. Which they’re looking into the possibility of reducing the manufacturing cost at least by 10 times, making the OLEDs-powered luminous sheets or wallpapers easily available in a much cheaper cost to consumers.

Besides, the engineers are looking into making their organic LEDs more efficient than those found in the current lighting industry, such as the current industry benchmark shows 15 lumens per watt (lm/W), whereas GE’s latest OLEDs can emit 30 lm/W. And they won’t just stop there, which they’re still looking for higher as the 30 lm/w is still far behind from the 100 lm/W efficiency of compact fluorescent bulbs. Although they can produce the 60 lm/W in a more expensive process, but their goal is to achieve manufacturing the 60 lm/W in their much lower cost roll-to-roll process as soon as possible, which could be sometime before 2010. And the kind of luminous wallpapers would only be available to us after 2010.

GE is also getting little more ambitious, which they’re looking into possibility of blending the current OLED displays with their OLED light sources, which the result would be the wallpapers of your entire room could be used either for watching high-resolution video or lighting. Of course, to blend these two together, they’ll need more researches looking into how to mix the two. As the OLED display is a technology that deals with tiny pixels, each one red, green, blue. Whereas their OLED lighting tech works more on long and big pixels.

via [dvice]

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