When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
- Rudyard Kipling, The Young British Soldier

The plains of display history contain the remains of many start-up companies that developed what they believed were better display technologies - and sometimes were. Most of these technologies failed to establish a convincing technological or business case for themselves, often because they could not successfully chase the ever-declining costs of LCD and plasma.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

At the moment, there are a handful of emerging technologies whose developers are actually selling signficant amounts of product to customers, and the two best-established of these are, not surprisingly, organic lighting-emitting diode (OLED) displays and electrophoretic displays (EPDs). Not only have these technolgoies (finally) become reasonably well established, but the projections for revenue growth are robust.

OLED revenues grew from about $0.5B in 2007 to $0.6B in 2008, and are projected (by DisplaySearch) to jump to $1.1B this year, $2B in 2011, $3B in 2012, and $5.5B in 2015, the year in which TVs will first account for more OLED revenue than mobile handsets.

Sales of electronic paper displays (almost all of them EPDs) pulled in just $3.5M in 2007, but revenues are projected to grow to between $290M (iSuppli) and $650M (DisplayBank) in 2012, with DisplayBank projecting $2.1B in 2015. Insight Media forecasts nearly $10B in sales of electronic book readers by 2013, but does not break out the revenue at the display component level.

It’s very hard for an emerging display technology to succeed because it’s not enough to be a bit better than the established technologies. The established technologies will beat you on cost, and their cost will drop precipitously during the time you’re developing your new technologoy. They will also get better. Therefore, it is almost always true that a successful new display technology does something the established technologies can’t do. (Be light enough and thin enough to be used in a notebook PC, for example, and be able to work on battery power for a reasonable time.)

But you need a perfect storm. In addition to developing a technology with unique characteristics, you need an application that is enabled by those characteristic, and that customers want to buy. The problem is that it’s very likely such an application - to the extent that it will exist at all - doesn’t exist when you’re developing your display, and you probably can’t imagine it. RCA’s Robert Sarnoff wanted a flat display to enable hang-on-the-wall TV, but the applications that first provided a market for simple LCDs were digital watches and electronic calculators. Ultimately, the biggest impetus came from notebook (then "laptop") PCs, an application not dreamed of in the 1960s when RCA Labs was doing its seminal LCD development work.

So all you can do is jump off the cliff and hope you can sew a parachute for yourself on the way down. For EPDs and E Ink, the technology’s leading developer, that parachute is the e-book reader (EBR), which requires just those characteristics that EPD provides: extremely low power consumption, reflective display that looks similar to ink on paper, light weight, and rugged.

OLED is the exception to the rule. It does not enable any new applications. It’s current acceleration in growth is based on mobile handsets, where it is arguably better looking and more power-efficient that LCDs, but those are incremental improvements. Most mobile handsets use LCDs, where they perform very effectively. We could argue that the reason OLED has grown so slowly (until now) is because they were "nice" rather than "necessary," while costing more than the incumbent display (of course).

The futures of all other emerging display technologies are less assured that those of OLED and EPD. These technologies could include Qualcomm’s iMOD, LiquaVista’s electrowetting display, Kent Display’s cholesteric LCD, Pixtronix’s lateral MEMs display, and others. Qualcomm has several mobile handset customers, LiquaVista should be in watch-type products soon, Kent is licensing its technology for signage applications and is about to ramp its roll-to-roll manufacturing line, Pixtronix has prototypes and is engaging with potential partners.

All of these technologies have interesting feature sets, but none has found an application that requires its feature set to be marketable. At least, not yet.