I'm mesmerized by the kaleidoscope of spectacular moving images on the big, intense, expensive plasma and LCD screens at CES, the Consumer Electronic Show running this week in Las Vegas. Flat panel display vendors are showcasing higher resolutions, faster refresh rates, thinner form factors and better interfaces.
But the milestone this year is image quality. Sony and Samsung are showing OLED screens, organic light emitting diode products that are spectacularly thin but -- much more important -- that deliver spectacularly glorious color. (We've been talking about OLED for years.)
An LCD screen uses a light source, generally a sickly fluorescent, behind the liquid crystal louvers that let out the pixels. A plasma screen uses tiny cells of gas to excite phosphor dots per pixel. On an OLED screen, each pixel is a diode that lights up as needed; the black is truly black, the color gamut is richer, and there's no flicker.
I'm an HDTV skeptic; I'm a bit too cheap, and I really can't really appreciate the difference between 480 lines and 720 lines of resolution, but this is different, a big step up in the fidelity of the video experience. It's more like viewing a transparency through a light box versus the old days of tweaking the rabbit ears to pull in channel 2.
Engadget has produced a terrific gallery of SONY OLED screens on the web, but you really have to see it to believe it. I'm glad I did.
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