< id="logo">>

3D TVs have, for a little while, been the upcoming thing in the home technology world. The fact that manufacturers are working so hard to produce ever better three dimensional images suggests that the future is bright for 3D TV – especially when considering  the commitment of broadcasters such as Sky.

That said, there is another rival technology which has recently appeared on the market that might just take some of the wind out of the 3D sales’ sails, particularly whilst there is still a relative lack of 3D material out there. The new technology is OLED, and many experts think that is signals the end of the LCD television.

OLED stands for ‘Organic Light Emitting Diode’ and its main benefit is that it uses a significantly smaller amount of power than just about anything else on the market. It is practically paper thin (seriously, it’s unbelievably thin) and has no need for a back light because of the way that the electrical currents are used to ‘draw’ colours onto the screen. Incredibly, without the back light, it’s still brighter than your average LCD TV.

Oh, and if you want to (though I’m not sure why you would) you can bend it or even fold it and it still works.

The possible applications for OLED are enormous, not least because it produces its own light. The drawback at the moment is that it’s very expensive, so we shouldn’t be expecting phones, and even billboards and posters, to appear in OLED just yet. However, some of the biggest tech companies in the world are working on making OLED cheaper, and when it does, it could blow everything else out of the water.

At the moment there’s no reason to assume that some clever spark won’t be able to produce a 3D TV with OLED technology, although you may have to be rather wealthy to afford it. With both technologies relatively expensive at the moment, OLED is losing out because of the publicity that surrounds 3D TV, but it wouldn’t be wise to bet against OLED winning the race in the long run.