Six years ago, we put out a video on micro LED,
or micro LED as I call it, an emerging display tech that looked poised
to overtake OLED. There was even a report that Apple invested
around $3 billion into micro LED with an aim of debuting it in a new Apple Watch.
And that made some sense as micro LED displays offer crucial advantages over the current state of the art,
OLED. They last much longer, they resist burn in,
and they can get much brighter all the while, also having self lighting pixels
and those inky dark black levels. But here we are six years later,
and micro LED displays are barely anywhere to be seen.
What gives? For starters, micro LED is very difficult to manufacture.
Not only do you have to place the sub pixels onto the display one at a time,
and there's a lot of them, but if one of those sub pixels ends up being dead,
then you have to take it off and put a new one in its place.
But it can be tough to do this without damaging nearby pixels.
And once this happens enough, you've suddenly got a dud of a product.
A related issue is just how small the pixels need to be.
Although in a strict sense, you can build a micro LED display with big pixels.
Samsung's almost famous The Wall actually had relatively large ones.
The problem is that the wafers upon which the LEDs are printed are extremely expensive.
And to make micro LED cost effective, you need to be able to make multiple displays
from a single wafer, meaning smaller pixels.
But making pixels that small is also quite challenging,
as some pixels are more likely to come out defective and shrinking them down also makes them much less efficient.
For example, a micro LED size blue LED is only about 40% efficient.
But even that is nothing compared to red, which is notoriously inefficient.
We're talking around 1% efficient.
Sounds like a lot of energy and a lot of heat. So how in the world is the industry
looking at fixing this problem? It's actually possible to combine quantum dots
which emit specific colors of light according to their size
with micro LEDs to make them brighter.
Although this is tricky because the number of photons coming out of the LEDs is often higher
than quantum dots can effectively handle, it's something that the industry is looking
for a way to do effectively. However, despite the fact that micro LED
can get brighter than OLED, OLED technology, partly with the help of quantum dots,
has evolved to the point where brightness isn't as much of an issue as it used to be,
which is important for HDR. In fact, there are now OLED TVs
that can hit 3,000 nits of brightness, which is plenty bright for most applications.
So where exactly does that leave micro LED? It did look like the initial advantage of micro LED,
namely better efficiency and enhanced brightness, would make it good for something like a smartwatch,
which you'd often be looking at in bright sunlight.
Apple thought the same, obviously, which is why they invested billions into micro LED production for the Apple Watch,
but they canceled these plans in early 2024 due to the difficulties we already mentioned,
as well as the fact that higher end watch displays
are pretty darn good in terms of brightness and battery life.
And guess what? The current Apple Watch uses OLED.
NanoSys, a major developer of micro LED technology, likewise sold off their micro LED fab
to a startup that isn't even gonna be using it to make displays. Instead, they're gonna use micro LEDs
for multi-terabit interconnects. So basically, using it for optical communication,
which is pretty cool in its own right, but a very far cry from the original vision
of micro LED being the future of TVs, monitors, and watch displays.
Between OLED's development future looking bright
and the emergence of competing technologies like Qdell or QDEL, essentially quantum dots
that emit their own light when you feed them electricity, that promise many of the benefits of micro LED
without the ridiculous manufacturing problems. Micro LED might end up only being a thing
in applications that we now consider niche. For example, they might end up powering augmented reality
glasses due to their high brightness. We're talking like three million nits brightness.
It's crazy, but it's far from a sure thing. In the meantime, we do at least have
this cool micro LED concept laptop, but I'm not sure why you'd want everyone
being able to see what you're looking at from the other side of the screen. So thanks for watching guys.
If you liked this video, you might wanna see our original video on micro LED.
You can check that out right here, it's somewhere.