SED: The Next Big Thing

The hardware world is full of three letter acronyms. Here’s one you might not have heard yet, but certainly will in the future.

It has probably happened to most of you. You’re sitting there with all your friends watching the big game, and you get up to grab some snacks. You come back with a Mr. Pibb in one hand and Red Vines in the other, only to find that the friend you never really liked has commandeered your spot. Frustrated, you go to the next available seat; you know, that steel chair over there in the corner of the room, as far away from the TV and the rest of the action as possible. Aside from the pain developing in your lower back and the cobwebs you’re still trying to wipe off your face, it’s actually quite nice over there. At least you can enjoy your crazy delicious snacks and not have to worry about having your friends hear you fart up a storm. But wait, there’s another problem… you can’t see the TV. You can make out some of the announcer’s ramble, and you caught a quick glance through heads and shoulders at a pretty hot cheerleader, but beyond the momentary lapses in obstructions, that 22” CRT TV you bought with your birthday money is just not cutting it. Then you get an idea: Elevate the TV so that everyone can see it easily. Oh wait, it weighs like 60 lbs and the only thing that doesn’t have food or magazines all over it is Barbie’s dream house. I bet you’re wishing you had invested in a bigger TV right now.

The thing about TVs these days is that they usually have to be big. Unfortunately, the bigger the TV gets, the more it weighs. If you’ve ever tried to move a big traditional CRT TV, you know it’s not easy. That’s where LCD TVs come in. Not only do they get to pretty decent sizes, but they are light and thin enough to mount high up on a wall or sit safely on a shelf or elevated surface that a fat CRT wouldn’t fit. It seems perfect. Now you can sit in the corner and see the TV if that jerk friend of yours takes your seat again, right? Not really, LCD TVs have their disadvantages. Chances are that not only won’t you be able to see a skewed version of the big game, but half of your friends will be left partially in the dark as well. This is due to something called a viewing angle, a characteristic with which the LCD monitor is inferior to all other display types. Enter: Plasma. Here you have a display that is still a lot thinner than a CRT, has a really good viewing angle, an amazingly sharp image with high contrast ratio, and a super cool name. Perfect. Well, if perfect means mounting a display that is at least as heavy as two huge sheets of glass on your wall and not saving any money on electricity doing so, then yeah, Plasma displays are perfect. Technologies like Plasma and LCD have their downfalls, and those disadvantages have come under fire recently with the emergence of new technologies promising to usurp the current thin-screen champs.

By now you’ve all probably heard about something called an OLED and how it is the next best thing since mashed potatoes. Sure, OLEDs are showing a lot of promise and sure, they might even take over the world some day, but there are some problems with these displays that are not very easy to work around. OLEDs are made out of organic materials that are susceptible to damage from all sorts of things, including small traces water. When’s the last time your old CRT stopped working because of a little bit of home cleaning? However, the fragile nature of the OLED construction is far from the most worrisome problem with the technology. The organic materials that contain the light-emitting molecules have a pretty short life span, approximately 1000 hours. Now assuming, conservatively assuming, you keep your TV on for three hours a day. This means that your OLED will likely “burn out” in less than a year. Raise your hand if you want to go buy a new TV every year.

So we have our cathode ray tubes (CRTs) that are way too big and heavy and use too much power. We have our LCD screens with terrible viewing angles, poor contrast ratios, black levels, and even worse response times. We have Plasma screens that still weigh a lot and use quite a bit of power as well. Then we have OLEDs, with their (for now) short lifespan and fragile construct. There’s GOT to be a better way!
{mospagebreak heading=Introduction&title=SED: The Alternative}
SED

EASILY the biggest news coming out of any trade show this year was something called a Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display (SED). The new display technology developed by Canon and Toshiba was unveiled at CES in January of this year and is already being regarded as the real next big thing from the top media organizations in attendance.

To have a new product leave such an impression on the naturally critical hardware correspondents is a pretty amazing feat to say the least. So what exactly is this “SED” and what makes it so damn good?

These days you would be extremely hard pressed to find anyone willing to agree that the image quality of a high-end CRT screen can be beat. A lot of these diehard CRT fans are in the arena of competitive gaming, where it is nearly impossible to find a professional gamer on an LCD screen by choice. The primary argument of most of these steadfast gamers is over a subject called “ghosting”. Ghosting occurs in LCD monitors due to something called response time. On an LCD, pixels have to switch from being active to inactive in order to display an image. The amount of time it takes them to do this is called response time. A common response time for gaming-grade LCD’s these days is about 8ms. 8ms is pretty quick, 8 thousandths of a second. However, in this amount of time, images can get “mixed together”, creating a blurred or fuzzy image that is disgustingly annoying to hardcore gamers that demand superb image quality and no “lag”. Although not really noticeable to a gamer that has been exclusively using LCD monitors for quite some time, ghosting is very apparent to a gamer trying to migrate from CRT to LCD. CRT displays do not exhibit ghosting because response times are virtually non-existent. It is this “image quality” characteristic that makes LCD monitors look undesirable in the eyes of gamers. To the rest of the world however, issues like limited viewing angles, very untrue black, and often times less-than-vibrant colors are more severe problems. Plasma screens on the other hand have great picture quality in contrast to LCD’s, but still not as good as a high quality CRT display. They use the same technology as fluorescent lights to produce a very bright picture and due to the nature of their construction, also have a very wide viewing angle. However, if you’ve recently checked the prices of Plasma screens, you probably noticed what would seem like an extra digit tacked on the end. That is because Plasma displays cost A LOT of money. Price, and the fact that they sure don’t save you anything on the electricity bill, makes Plasma screens a somewhat less than perfect option.

It seems like each of the three aforementioned mainstream technologies have their advantages and disadvantages. If only there were a way to combine the three into a “super-display” of sorts that could end up being the end-all TV or computer monitor. Well, that is exactly what SED is supposed to be.

-Canon Technologies

SED works a lot like a CRT monitor. In a CRT monitor, an electron gun (made up of a cathode and some anodes) shoots electrons through a large glass tube (cathode ray tube) at a large flat surface (screen) that is coated in phosphor. When the negatively charged electrons collide with the phosphor-coated surface, they excite the material, causing electrons to drop valence rings, and give off visible light photons. If you’ve ever seen inside a monitor, you will have seen something glowing at the skinny end of the big glass tube. This is the cathode filament, which heats up the cathode and causes it to emit a bunch of electrons. Anodes then take these electrons and speed them up and focus them in a concentrated beam towards the phosphor-coated screen. In color monitors, three electron suns (Red, Green, and Blue) work together to produce the image you see.

-Canon Technologies

In an SED screen however, the electron gun is replaced by something called an electron emitter. The principle is the same here: generate electrons and make them hit a phosphor-coated screen. An electron emitter works by sending a small charge of about 10-20 Volts through a cathode (electrode) to create electrons. These electrons would move accordingly down the “path” and end up wherever they ended up. Instead, there are little “slits” or gaps in their path that cause some of the electrons to stray ever so slightly off the path and end up scattering out of this narrow gap (several nanometers wide) and into the void in between the two glass substrates. At this point, the electrons are hit with a much larger amount of voltage, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 Volts, which causes them to accelerate straight in the direction of the phosphor-coated display screen. There are three of these little slits, or electron emitters, per pixel on the monitor. This means that if a monitor has a resolution of 1280×1024, there would be more than 3.9 million electron emitters producing the image. Because each pixel is generated by its own set of electron emitters, the need for the long cathode ray tube and beam deflector is eliminated, resulting in a very thin final product.

The process seems really complicated, and it kind of is, but the end result is simple: a screen capable of producing an image unlike any of the reporters at CES had ever seen. SED monitors that have been developed so far and displayed at trade shows provide contrast ratios of nearly 10,000:1 (displayed whites are ten thousand times brighter than displayed blacks). However, the technology is expected to reach its full contrast ratio capability of 100,000:1. That’s a big number; easily ten times greater than the next best thing. Here are specifications that are supposed to be achieved on the final product (approximate):

Response Time: Less than 1ms
Contrast Ratio: 100,000:1
Viewing Angle: 180° in each direction (full hemisphere)
Power Consumption: Less than LCDs, highly efficient
SED is also expected to fully support all HDTV video modes (1080i, 720p, etc.)

{mospagebreak title=Impact and Future}
What this means

Basically what SED technology allows for is unparalleled image quality. One characteristic of this would be the result of the contrast ratio, meaning the black levels will be extremely high. Imagine being in a dark room watching a letterboxed movie and the only thing you can possibly see is the movie itself, not the black margins on the top and bottom of the screen.

Most importantly for gamers however will be the response time/refresh rate capabilities of SED technology. Imagine watching a real life re-enactment of Counter-Strike on de_dust2 being played simultaneously on an LCD screen, Plasma Display Panel (PDP), and SED screen right in front of you. You are watching the POV through a scoped sniper rifle from the offensive spawn when a defensive player crosses the gap between double doors. On the LCD screen, this character would probably appear very “sketchy”; exhibiting that ghosting effect we talked about earlier. On the plasma screen, the character would look much less “sketchy” but also not as define as you would be accustomed to on a CRT monitor. On the SED, the character would be so vividly portrayed that not only would you be able to easily distinguish him, but you could probably also tell whether or not he needs to pick his nose. It is something that is really hard to explain in words and must be experienced before drawing any personal conclusions.

The best part of the whole thing, surprisingly, might be the cost. Sure, when they come out, these monitors will cost a boat load of money. However, eventually they should be no more expensive, if not less expensive than CRT monitors. Similarly to the production of OLED materials, printers can be used very effectively in the production of SED materials. This means that large sheets of the SED “electron emitter” can be printed and added to the necessary circuitry (also produced in a printed fashion) to drastically reduce cost of production. This is all speculation of course; SED technology probably won’t be available from Canon and Toshiba for your Average Joe until early 2007.

With all the attention being paid to new video card and processor technologies these days, it would seem like monitors and display methods have all but dropped to an afterthought. However, with technology like SED on the horizon, our computing experience could be greatly enhanced from the monitor itself, especially gaming.

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