Upscale television and computer screens are increasingly backlit by organic light-emitting diode cells. Not only do they make displays look brighter and more defined, they save energy and last longer. The hitch? They're incredibly expensive -- a cost that gets passed onto consumers.
But DuPont may have just come up with a solution to this problem. The company says it has devised a new manufacturing process that can churn out even very large television displays at very high volumes, which would lower the overall costs for everyone involved. The process in question prints the OLED cells -- self-illuminating, organic units -- directly onto conductive layers very quickly (example is pictured).
According to MIT Technology Review, the printer DuPont is using, made by Dai Nippon Printing, can print a 50-inch television screen in less than two minutes. To put this in context, the largest OLED display currently for sale is a 15-inch television made by LG Electronics. It retails for $2,725. The new DuPont process could potentially slash this price.
What makes this printing process special? It takes into account each of the 12 to 15 printed layers that go into a display. It makes sure that the glowing molecules are soluble in the right layers, and not soluble in those adjacent to them, so they don't smear together. As you can imagine, this is a precarious process.
In the past, OLED manufacturing processes have been hit or miss (very easy and expensive to mess up), but DuPont says its printing techniques could reliably mass produce large screens, which could then last for more than 15 years. It's unclear whether they would be cost competitive with current liquid crystal displays on the market (the default for big displays), but the technology is certainly getting there.