Sony XEL-1 estimated to last customers only half as long as expected
By Darren Murph 
posted May 8th 2008 3:04AM
posted May 8th 2008 3:04AM
[Via Yahoo, thanks to everyone who sent this in]
posted May 8th 2008 3:04AM
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
A 12% drop in luminance after 1000 hours for blue!? 7 and 8% for red and green!?
1000 hours is less than 3 hours a day for a year, which is easy to do.
The big benefits of OLED are 1) power consumption, 2) contrast ratio, and 3) color accuracy.
Sony's 11" screen eats 45 Watts, which is about the same as many 20" LCD's -- which have almost 4x the screen area. So, Sony's XEL-1 gets a big fat F at OLED benefit number one.
If the individual colors are fading at different rates...and at up to 12% per year...then color accuracy is going away pretty fast too; so, Sony gets about a C for benefit number 3, on my arbitrary scale.
And, as the luminance/brightness drops, the effective contrast ratio falls too. Even if the display's black emits no light, it'll still reflect light from other sources, so the contrast ratio is never infinite. Every drop in luminance is a drop in contrast ratio...but the ratio will probably remain higher than other technologies for at least a few years of use...so, I'll say A-.
A-, C, and F. That's not a good report card.
I read somewhere that they use a repurposed Bravia board in this set. That is what probably eats all the power. It's not even HD so all the set really offers is a small form factor and high contrast. These are not things that I would personally want to pay a 10x premium on. OLED does look very promising but its still early days. Once the screen size gets bigger, the reliability goes up and the price goes down we may eventually be able to say goodbye to LCD and plasma.
OLED is too immature to promise anything. Those rates don't fair well at all. Considering the price to screen ratio, it's going to stay young for a while.
Sony over-promising and under-delivering? No! They would never do that.
Of course not, aren't you enjoying all of your ps3 games that run at a rock steady 120fps? For all the shit that anyone can give sony I do have to say that if I were to need a marketing team to create hype, I'd go to the leader of hype, sony..
Firts of all, I want to say something about this particular model. I saw it in person and the screen was soo small, I could not beleive the price they were charging for a screen twice the size of my psp. They claim 1,000,000 to 1 contras ratio, but it did not look any better than a 21" lcd. I just can't get excited about 11" screen. My psp looks just as good on a 5" screen, but blow the picture up to 55" and we'll see if it still looks that good. I understand that it's new tech, but come on, 11" screen. Wasn't that normal size screen in the 50's. Anyway, and what is up with the stand with all the inputs? If they are going to slim the TV, slim the whole thing. The new slim LCD did it, I don't need a skinny tv and an armoire for the inputs that sits as a piece of furniture. It's like making a super light electric car but have a trailer as a battery.
Isn't this a test model for OLED? I thought that I read somewhere that there was only 2,000 units being produced. That may have been a first run but I cannot imagine that Sony has made very many of these units.
The color drop is substantial but there is nothing stating that it will be linear. It could drop 12% in the first 1000 hours and only 5% in the next 5000. We just do not know but in my limited experience with OLED technologies this non-linear degradation would be normal.
DUH!
You can not extrapolate the full life from the initial unit luminance decrease.
Anyone who has bother to do the same tests with DLP will tell you that.
On a dlp projector you can lose 10% in 24 hours of use. They don't die in a month.
It's the 1000-2000 hour mark that I'd be interested in. I'm also curious if they were running the panel at %100 percent brightness or not.
Display search is firm devoted mostly to LCD manufacturers and customers. They really should know better. They have poor methods like this and then charge 10-15k to meet with their analysts.