i thought the next big thing in tvs was going to be micro led a technology with
all the advantages of OLED and none of the downsides it was going to be sweet
but i was wrong samsung recently announced that they are seizing all lcd
production by the end of the year and investing 11 billion dollars in OLED
but with quantum dots quarterbacks
why would you even want that why didn't they do this already
to learn more we talked to nanosis the company that actually makes the majority
of the world's quantum dots who gave us absolutely fascinating answers to all of
these questions and more origin pc just
introduced multiple Corsair case options for their desktops and new laptops
powered by the latest Intel and NVIDIA tech customize your origin pc with a
samsung 970 evo m.2 at originpc.com or
the link below
quantum dots can make oleds better in three key ways more accurate colors
higher brightness which is great for HDR and wider viewing angles
sound familiar great because that's exactly the same
benefits that quantum dots have been bringing to lcds for years now but the
way that samsung's going to use them on oleds is different from anything that
we've seen before look at this nanasis roadmap for 2018 it's divided into three
sections which we can think of as present near future and not so near
future here in the present all quantum dot displays are lcds with quantum dot
enhancement films what samsung's planning with their qd display oleds is
in the near future second half of 2021 to be exact but covid so then in the far
future we've got wacky micro lead competitors that are neither lcd nor ole
but we'll save that for later to help us understand this roadmap and the tech
that could be in your next tv let's start with a quick primer on why quantum
dots are useful in the first place
quantum dots are molecule-sized spheres of nano-semiconductor materials that
emit light if you provide them with energy and they behave differently
according to their size so if you shine a high-energy photon like a blue light
add a quantum dot that's seven nanometers wide it'll glow red
shine the light on a three nanometer dot
and it'll glow green the best part is nano cysts can vary
their output in one nanometer steps
so they get to be really picky about what color shines out
blue that's just what i wanted
so quantum dots allow a display to glow true red or true green and that's not
just an opinion you can tell by looking at the waveform of the light for
comparison here is a typical lcd
backlight unit these lights don't actually shine white
they shine blue which you can see here then they're treated with a yag phosphor
so that it all mixes into white but you see how narrow that blue light
is the industry uses a measure called full width half max it's the width of
the wave halfway up its amplitude so our
blue led has a full width half max of about 20 to 30 nanometers right here
the yag portion on the other hand well that is a big wide 100 nanometer mess
containing contaminating colors like pink orange and teal
that's a problem the white light from the source then passes through color
filters at the display subpixels to separate the light into red green and
blue now these filters themselves have a pretty loose definition for each color
so what ends up hitting your eye inevitably goes through this game of
telephone garbage in garbage
out but what if we made our white light using a
blue backlight with red and green quantum dots
well now everything has a full width half max of
just 30 nanometers
then when the color filters take say red they only get red not you know
orange or something now we get really accurate output something that's good
enough for color professionals in print or content creation
or for a high quality HDR monitor since
HDR specs require wide color gamuts in addition to very high contrast
but it kind of makes you wonder if you start with pure red green and
blue why do you even need the color filters
so this is the difference between phase one and phase two of the nemesis roadmap
the new quantum dot oleds that samsung's making don't use quantum dot enhancement
films like we've seen on every quantum dot display so far
instead they have quantum dots inkjet
printed onto the panel substrate itself
these displays then don't have color filters they just have quantum dot color
conversion and the difference in wording there is deliberate a filter stops all
of the colors of light that you don't want and keeps the color that you do but
that's a waste of light and therefore energy conversion with quantum dots takes all
of the light and converts it into the desired color with an efficiency or
quantum yield and that is a sci-fi marketing term if i ever saw one greater
than 95 so with this new knowledge let's go back
to the three ways that quantum dots will make oleds better number one they will
have more accurate colors because quantum dots have slightly narrower full
width half maxes than the current OLED solution number two
the brightness will be higher because more of the emitted light will be allowed to pass through instead of being
blocked and number three they will have
wider viewing angles because quantum dots are just plain better at scattering
light evenly in all directions than the around
50 degrees that current oleds give you before the colors start to shift
so that's what's happening but
why is it happening now samsung's been using quantum dots and making the
world's best OLED screens for smartphones for years now i mean didn't
they already have all the ingredients does anybody know why they didn't just
put them together not really samsung's amoled phone displays are RGB oleds
while the big screen tvs that lg makes are wo-led no one's been able to scale
RGB oleds beyond small screen sizes like this because of manufacturing
limitations and samsung's inexperience making big
screen oleds means they have to play catch-up in terms of addressing geometry
because the driver i sees on the edge of the display are so far away from the
pixels in the center they also have to figure out exactly how
to make an OLED using a lone blue phosphor ideally the blue light wouldn't
have to be converted avoiding any efficiency loss at all but for that to
happen it has to be the right blue royal blue sort of like this underwear from
lttstore.com and not aquamarine or
something dark and purpley which has been common in the past it's difficult
because unlike quantum dots these phosphors are complex organic materials
that are doped with europium and other rare earth materials and you can't sort
these millions of molecules after the fact you can only control the
manufacturing the rumor right now is that samsung will be targeting the dci
p3 color gamut using a mixed blue emitter without conversion
then there's the manufacturing side the color converting quantum dots have to be
printed onto the display substrate that means that not only does the inkjet
printing for color filtering on large displays need to be possible which only
happened recently but the quantum dots themselves need to be integrated into
inks that don't clog the inkjet nozzles can be printed in open air rather than in a
vacuum and can be cured using standard manufacturing methods
this thing's expensive i'm not gonna throw it i personally cannot wait to get
my hands on these qd OLED displays so get subscribed so you don't miss that
but what about that far future section of the road map well this is where
things get really sci-fi quantum dot
electroluminescent or qdel displays
sounds kind of dumb but QLED was already taken i guess so
remember how quantum dots shine when you put energy into them well that energy
doesn't have to be a shining light you could power them with electricity
here the quantum dots themselves would form the pixels simplifying the
technology stack and because quantum dots aren't as sensitive as oleds they
don't need to be manufactured in vacuum chambers with walls as thick as a
battleships that enables manufacturing that is so much simpler that it could
reap other breakthroughs like truly flexible substrates that can fold at
tighter radiuses than we've seen so far or devices so cheap and so thin that
your wallpaper could be a display bad tech is actually in the lab today
with research by nanosis customers happening all over the world so then
what are we waiting for well the limiting factor right now is lifetime
particularly of the blue and green quantum dots the problem has to do with
non-radiative recombination pathways in layman's terms if you put energy into a
device and not all of it turns into light the rest is either creating heat
or breaking chemical bonds that's a problem now nanosis thinks that
we're going to get this sorted out within the next five years or so so that would mean that the first devices to hit
the market would come in around 2025 to
2027. not bad considering that we're trying to
understand these materials at the atomic scale what's in your online security
toolkit private internet access lets you mask your ip and encrypt traffic to and
from your device and they've got reliable service with over 3000 servers
in more than 30 different countries with pia you've got no bandwidth caps you've
got configurable encryption and an internet kill switch to keep you in
control of your connection and when combined with private browsing pia can
make even websites that are pretty competent think that you are in a
different country try it out risk-free with their 30-day money-back guarantee
and connect up to five devices at once with clients for Windows macOS Android
iOS and Linux their mace feature even blocks requests
to known malware and tracking domains all together we're going to have it
linked down below so if you're wondering where micro led fits into all this check
out our video where we explain why something called mass transfer is
keeping those from hitting the market on mass it's a really good one