Sony prototype razor-thin OLED panels

If you thought Sony's 3-millimeter thick XEL-1 OLED (organic light emitting diode) TV was cool then you haven't seen anything yet! The XEL-1 contained a 1.4-mm thick panel, but now Sony has managed to slim that down to just 0.3mm. It's also managed to make a 3.5-inch prototype screen that's just 0.2mm thick. Both screens started out as a normal OLED screen but Sony ground down the glass substrate on which it was made to reduce the thickness. The razor-thin displays are perhaps some of the most impressive yet shown thanks in equal parts to their thinness and the bright, rich image possible with an OLED screen. The panels aren't Sony's first thin OLED screens. Last year it developed a prototype OLED built onto a plastic substrate, which has the benefit of allowing the screen to be flexible. The latest screens are brittle because they are glass-based. There was no word on when or if the thin OLED screens on show might be commercially available.

LG thin Scarlet TVs

LG Electronics is the latest TV maker to join the thin-TV market with the launch of its Scarlet TV set. The TV is LG's thinnest flat-panel TV yet at just 45 millimeters thick, which isn't thin enough to beat Sharp's X-series LCD TVs that recently went on sale in Japan. The Sharp TVs are 34 millimeters at their thinnest point, and swell slightly to 38 millimeters at the thickest point. The Scarlet sets will be sold in the U.S. under the LG60 brand name and in Europe under the LG6000 name. A 47-inch model in the range is already on sale in the UK and boasts a full high-definition (1,920 pixel by 1,080 pixel) screen and 100Hz fast scanning to provide a smoother image when showing fast motion. Other sets will go on sale soon in markets around the world.

E-paper chip allows annotations

A new electronic paper display could allow users to annotate pages in electronic books, make amendments to documents and erase parts of the page with as much ease as using a real pen and paper. The screen combines a conventional electronic paper display with a touch panel and a newly developed control chip. The chip, from Seiko Epson, can control a screen with up to four times the resolution of current "writable" e-paper devices such as iRex Technologies' iLiad and also refreshes the display faster, eliminating the slight lag between movement of the stylus and its effect on the screen. The new chip shortens the update time so the screen can be refreshed 50 times per second. That means lines appear on the screen as they are drawn by the user and interpreted by the touch-panel interface. The chip supports a screen of up to 2,048 pixels by 1,536 pixels and will be available commercially from August.

Fujitsu wooden laptop

Could this be the environmentally friendly laptop of the future? Fujitsu has designed a laptop PC with a case manufactured from wood rather than the more traditional plastic or metal. The laptop, which is only a prototype, uses cedar wood for the case and also makes use of bio-plastics for parts. Bio-plastics are plastics produced from renewable sources such as vegetable oil rather than petroleum used in traditional plastics. The laptop PC carries the names of Fujitsu and Monacca, a Japanese design team that specializes in wooden products. The wood PC is only a concept and Fujitsu has no plans to put it on sale.