Sony shows off new rollable OLED screen

Sony now has a new flexible Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) display that is so small that it can be rolled around a pen or pencil in the office.

The screen is 4.1-inches and just 80 μm thick -- around the same width of a human hair -- and is able to display the image even when fully rolled up.  Sony said the screen can provide 432x240 pixel resolution, but there are no plans to release it to market.

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Sony will instead look for ways to use OLEDs in mobile phones, TVs, and other consumer gadgets over the next decade -- but didn't say when these new products could be available.

"Even after 1,000 cycles of repeatedly rolling-up and stretching the display, there was no clear degradation in the display's ability to reproduce moving images", Sony said in a press release explaining the new technology.

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The Japanese electronics company plans to show off the new OLED displays in the United States during the Society for Information Display later this week.

Sony is currently dealing with an LCD shortage, but continues to look towards the future of screen technology.  Although this looks promising, it's obvious that it will still be some time before we go to the local shopping mall and see OLEDs being used.  The company previously showed off an OLED screen that is somewhat flexible, but no where near the same level as this new product.

Several Japanese companies along with Sony are developing OLED technology, but it will still be years before most of these screens are implemented in real world products.  Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technologies government research program also hopes to one day manufacture OLEDs in a lower-priced, more efficient manner.

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