There was a flurry of news last week concerning upcoming display technologies. If you are interested in displays, it is about time to start getting excited.

The first technology that is on way, and in some cases is already here (as in with the Fujitsu P7230), are LCDs with LED backlighting. These panels will be coming to notebooks first, because low power demands, but should be appearing on more desktop displays as the year progresses. A few notebooks have them already and so do a few monitors, but this technology is still far from wide adoption. It should gain serious ground by the end of 2007 and make up a significant share of the market once a few of the kinks are worked out and the prices can level out. It will take it some time for average displays to be equipped with LEDs, but the technology should trickle down relatively quickly. While LED are power efficient, producers have also been pushing their accuracy and full color gamut in order to start hyping the products. Some announcements have already been made so things are clearly in the works.

The really exciting upcoming technology is not LED backlighting, but OLEDs. Companies like Samsung and Sony have been talking about OLEDs in a number of applications, like TVs and computer displays, but up to this point their usage has generally been restricted to the tiny screens on phones and MP3 players. The advantages of going with an OLED are numerous, including improved contrast, extremely vibrant colors, and great viewing angles, but as of right now there are serious downsides. The problems coupled with current OLED technology include their cost, challenges with producing large screens, and a limited operational life.

There has been some news about Sony's OLED future offerings including 11" and 27" models. The word is that they will have a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and resolutions of 1024x600 and 1920x1080. Both are slated to be insanely thin, in fact just 3mm for the 11" and 9mm for the 27". The smaller model looks to be the same one I photographed at CES back in January. CNet's Crave also covered the story and noted that once some manufacturing problems are worked out the OLEDs should be coming pretty quickly. OLEDs will not directly be a replacement for LCDs, as many people have pointed out, but for some time they will be an alternative. Each style has its strengths and just as it took some time for LCDs to gain the advantage over plasmas, OLED technology has a lot of maturing to do before they will be beating out LCDs. That said, early adopters and display fanatics should be justifiably excited for the upcoming months. No discussions of displays is complete with considering size. The trend over the past few months has been larger and wider, and there is no evidence than this will stop any time soon. Right now 20" and 22" widescreen models are all the rage, but 27" and 30" models are what I am keeping my eye on. 24" models have been available for some time now and as soon as prices drop we should see them become much more attractive to non-professional users. Size is always an issue, but considering the price difference between a 22" model and a 24" model or between a 24" and a 27"/30" there are still serious barriers to upgrading and there will be for some time.