I’m wondering if this is a “flying car” thing—if actually handing consumers ultra-thin bendable (but not actually creasable) panels would be a dumb idea, because consumers would try to exceed their tolerances and break them too easily.
(This is also, I think, why we don’t see more optical cabling standards outside of the enterprise space. The average consumer can’t be trusted to install a glass-fibre cable run without breaking it; and when they break it, they’ll get angry, because glass-fibre cables still cost a lot of money. And plastic-fibre cabling, though more tolerant, is far less of an improvement over copper, especially in attenuation distance.)
Also, aren't they used for curved TV screens and computer monitors?
There is a catch that programming these displays require one to learn differential geometry as a prerequisite.
I don't see the point of a display that folds. The display would be worse than any I currently own. It would be more prone to breakage due to the nature of what you're asking it to do.
I think it's one of those technologies that sounds neat, but in reality is not that useful (like 3D tvs)
3D TV's, on the other hand, I love and am very sad that they're now not being produced... Just when the size and resolution of TVs is getting good enough to make them worthwhile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKG7XRsG9KQ
(plus it would sell really well)
Flexible displays are far too fragile to be practical except in applications where they're literally bent only once and then affixed to something for the rest of their life.
There problem is, screens need a protective layer on top, and bendable glass tech hasn't caught up. You need to be able to embed a touch layer, have good optical clarity, be scratch resistant, and impart resistant.
I've, gently, played with production ready bendable LCDs. Then realized that they weren't practical for any of the sci-fi scenarios I had imagined.
This is what I don't get. It's entirely possible that I'm particularly unimaginative, but I can't even think of any devices with screens I'd want to bend. All of my devices bend exactly as much as I want them to: none (or at least negligibly).
How about a 75' TV you can carry around like a scroll.
It'd be a rather thick scroll. :)
The problem of break-ability again comes to mind.
The use case is niche. All the electronics for control still have to be there, so it isn't featherweight or anything, and it is not exactly pocket sized, and now the screen is really fragile.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/band
http://www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/gear-fit2/
Actual applications do exist. :)
Lots of cell phones have screens with a slight curve to them now days. Or in the case of Samsung's edge displays, a rather dramatic curve.
To the best of my knowledge, neither display in those fitness products was flexible, just bendable.
I know that as of a few years ago, Corning was hard at work on flexible "glass" for flexible displays.
I had the iliad, a Dutch tablet in the very early days of e-paper. Slow, unworkable latency in drawing, buggy software, low support for digital book formats. I tried a few other e-paper devices since then, but they didn't improve on a lot.
The Microsoft Surface 2 seriously improved on this space. But it was still not feeling well - still too much lag. And then there is the huge problem that Windows is not suitable for tablets - it's a nightmare to work with compared to Android.
Surface 3 got it right enough, the feel is good enough to do some serious drawing on it. Microsoft OneNote is pretty much ideal for many usecases but has its cases where it becomes unbearingly slow. I have not yet tried the Surface 4 or the iPad Pro.
The ideal of an android device with a OneNote version which supports plugins and an app-store on a color latencyless e-paper display is still a decade away it seems.
Burn-in is still a huge issue. I've used mine for about a year and the red channel is full of distracting burn-in patterns from still elements on my screen from things like wallpapers, tiled window borders, taskbar/docks, HUDs from games, etc.
Does anyone know if MicroLEDs could suffer from burn-in as well? I.e. do they also degrade over time based on usage?
I've tested this by filling my screen with each color, and burn-in is by far the most visible with a red fill.