14 DAY TRIAL // Back in July we brought you news that LG formally introduced an OLED panel with a diagonal of 18 inches that can also be rolled into a cylinder to become a tube 3 cm / 1.18 inches across.
Even before LG announced its futuristic looking panel, folks have been getting all excited about truly flexible panels that could be used to construct real-life technology.
For example, throughout the months we have seen a couple of interesting concepts detailing tablets with foldable displays. But what if we told you that such machines are actually not that far from us.
The 8.7-inch display that folds in the three is a real thing now
A new kind of technology has been showcased at the Display Innovation 2014 trade show that takes place in Yokohoma City, Japan. Semiconductor Energy Laboratory (or SEL) is the company behind an 8.7-inch Super AMOLED display that is unlike anything you have ever seen before. The panel is of the flexible variety and can be folded into three (as seen at Nikkei).
On top of sporting this amazing property, the panel also carries a heavy pixel count of 1920 x 1080, which translates into a pixel density of 254ppi.
SEL also introduced a smaller version of the display, with comes with a 5.9-inch form factor, although it should be mentioned that this version does not support full HD resolution and only keeps things at 720p resolution. Furthermore, the smaller panel doesn’t seem to come equipped with touch capabilities.
For the 8.7-inch panel, SEL used a c-axis aligned semiconductor, while its gate driver is formed on a substrate and its source driver is realized on chip on film.
The bendable display is said to support more than 100,000 times with the curvature bent supported is of 2mm and 4mm radius.
Foldable tablets anyone?
It remains to be seen how the technology can actually be implemented into a real-life product, but we can speculate.
As we told you above, some designers have toyed around with the idea of a flexible tablet that can bend in two (not in three).
Such a tablet was thought to have double utility – for example, one could use the gadget in tablet mode as well as into laptop mode (with a virtual keyboard) or smartphone mode.
But a tablet that can be bent in three parts? Sure, it’s a product users might carry more easily, because such a tablet could fit anywhere. Or it could be transformed into a wearable bracelet of some sorts. The possibilities are multiple and the future looks bright.
