New Display Tech Will Transform Our Screens --- Battery life and daylight visibility will improve on many laptops, phones and smartwatches

"American adults spend the majority of their waking hours looking at screens -- and yet most of those screens are based on the same LCD display tech that made its debut in the 1980s.

Soon, however, all that could change. A raft of new display technologies are on the way and promise a variety of benefits, from significantly extending the battery life of our wearables, mobile devices and laptops to making them slimmer, lighter and easier to read in full sunlight. At least one of these new types of displays could also enable future technologies that are impossible now, like lightweight augmented-reality smart glasses that project digital interfaces on top of what we see.

Between incremental improvements in existing display tech and these new developments, our devices' visual interfaces could change as much in the next five years as they did in the past 30.

When you use a tablet, laptop or last-generation smartphone, the light entering your eyes is probably being generated by an LED, or light emitting diode, which is shining through a grid of liquid-crystal pixels. The LED, in other words, is one type of "backlight" used to illuminate liquid-crystal display, or LCD, screens. An analogy: If your device's screen were an old-style movie projector, the LED is equivalent to the light bulb, the LCD would be the film, and you're staring directly into the projector.

LEDs are more power-efficient than the light sources that preceded them, like incandescent and fluorescent lights. They are now widely used in the lighting industry.

In microLEDs, each light-emitting semiconductor is tiny -- as small as a bacterium.

MicroLED displays can emit hundreds or even thousands of times more light per square millimeter than today's flat-panel screens. And they require significantly less power -- on the order of a tenth as much.

These are all reasons Apple has spent between $1.5 billion and $2 billion on both R&D and manufacturing capacity to create microLED displays, according to an estimate by Eric Virey, a senior analyst at IT-consulting firm Yole Group. Apple declined to comment on its plans, and has never confirmed that it is working on microLED technology -- though in 2014 it confirmed that it had acquired microLED company LuxVue for an undisclosed amount.

Apple's investment positions it to be the first company to produce microLED displays in high volume, says Mr. Virey. Analysts with visibility into Apple's supply chains and partner relationships in Asia believe that the first product to get these displays will be Apple's high-end smartwatches, such as the Apple Watch Ultra, and that the company could announce such a device as early as 2024.

One reason Apple appears to be starting with wearables is that microLED displays remain both expensive and devilishly difficult to manufacture, says Mr. Virey. And the more pixels there are in a microLED display, the harder and more expensive it is to manufacture.

While microLEDs could eventually make it into our smartphones, laptops or TVs, it will take a long time to get to that point.

"Say you're trying to make an 8K TV," says Mr. Virey. "It is akin to assembling 100 million microLEDs, each more or less the size of a bacteria, with accuracy of plus or minus 1 micron, in less than 10 minutes, with an accuracy of 99.99%."

Currently, Samsung offers microLED TVs, but they cost north of $100,000 apiece.

Google announced in May 2022 it had acquired microLED startup Raxium, but declined to comment further on its plans for the technology. In 2020, Meta announced an exclusive, multiyear agreement with U.K. microLED startup Plessey. "Meta is interested in this technology for potential use in AR/VR products," said a spokeswoman for the company.

Vuzix, a firm that has long been a provider of smart glasses to industry and the Department of Defense, already offers smart glasses that use microLEDs to project images into a user's field of view -- for $2,500 a pop.

As in the original black-and-white Game Boy, vintage Casio digital watches and the like, there is another way to build LCD displays: replace the backlight with a reflective surface. The result is a screen that is readable in any sufficiently bright ambient light.

Unlike conventional displays, these kinds of displays actually work better the brighter the environment they're in. As a result, they can use up to 90% less energy than conventional LCD displays, says Mike Casper, chief executive of Azumo, a company that recently unveiled a reflective LCD display technology it calls "LCD 2.0."

A limited run of a few thousand prototype tablets using Azumo's display tech has been produced by its partner, Foxconn, which also assembles the iPhone for Apple. Because reflective LCD displays can be made on existing LCD manufacturing lines, these displays could be both inexpensive and take advantage of the relative robustness of LCD panels.

"There is a niche, a need, a section of the market really looking for this," says Paul Hsiung, vice president of FIH Mobile, the Foxconn subsidiary that has partnered with Azumo to manufacture these displays. The niches include tablets for outdoor use, such as on construction sites, and for educational settings where all-day battery life is key and the ability to withstand a drop or a spill matters.

E Ink, a Boston-based company owned by a Taiwanese parent company also named E Ink, has been competing with existing display technology ever since Sony introduced the first black-and-white e-reader using E Ink in 2004. To this day, Amazon's monochrome Kindle e-readers still use E Ink displays. E Ink has shipped more than a billion displays during the lifetime of the company, although most of those are used to display things like prices in retail stores, says Timothy O'Malley, an assistant vice president at E Ink in the U.S.

Lenovo just unveiled a laptop that offers an E Ink screen, which Lenovo says will significantly increase the battery life of the laptop.

At least a half-dozen manufacturers have already declared their intent to roll out e-readers and tablets using E Ink's newest color display, says E Ink.

One of the biggest disadvantages all new display technologies have is that the infrastructure to create conventional displays is gigantic, and has the economies of scale to match. Plus, even these displays built on existing technology keep getting better.

But as consumers become comfortable working across devices, and moving among their phones, laptops and other gadgets, more specialized devices with new kinds of displays, for particular environments and contexts, have started to make more sense.

If this trend continues, it might mean even more screen time than ever before -- albeit on displays that stretch the definition of "screen."" [1]

1. EXCHANGE --- Keywords: New Display Tech Will Transform Our Screens --- Battery life and daylight visibility will improve on many laptops, phones and smartwatches
Mims, Christopher.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 21 Jan 2023: B.2.