A full colour OLED display that you can bend and wrap around a pencil has been showcased by Sony, giving a glimpse into the future of display technology.
The display is just 80 micrometres thick and measures 4.1 inches across the diagonal. Because it does not have any rigid internal components such as chips or backlighting it is possible to manipulate the display and make it fully flexible, which Sony demonstrates by rolling it up on a pencil in an impressive video online.
Sony has even constructed a rather complicated mechanism to automatically perform the wrapping and unwrapping to show just how malleable the display is. You can coil it up so that it has just a 4mm radius and it will keep on pushing out whatever video or images you feed into it.
The rollable OLED display has a 432×240 resolution and it is capable of displaying 16 million colours with a decent contrast ration of 1000:1. The brightness levels look rather good, which is always an encouraging sign and the chances are that this is even more impressive in real life given the difficulties of replicating OLED technology on standard LCD computer monitors.
Sony is working hard in this field and after Samsung unveiled its own transparent AMOLED screen earlier this week, it is clear that the competition in this market is becoming serious. We can only hope that the biros of the future will also be able to play back video for some wraparound amusement.
