SID announces winners of 2008 Display of the Year Awards

The Society for Information Display (SID; San Jose, CA) announced the winners of its 13th annual Display of the Year Awards (two awards in three categories), honoring those companies that are making advances in providing consumers with a superior viewing experience. The awards will be presented to the winners as part of Display Week 2008: The SID International Symposium, Seminar & Exhibition, taking place May 18-23, at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Dick McCartney, chair of SID's Display of the Year Awards committee, said, "Collectively, the 2008 award recipients have excelled at transitioning innovative products and technologies from 'hot' buzzword to 'cool' reality. The significant number of nominations we received around the world speaks to the mounting prestige associated with these accolades across the global display community. On behalf of SID, I would like to truly commend this year's award recipients' ongoing commitment to innovation and to shaping the future of today's display arena."

To qualify for consideration for a 2008 Display of the Year Award, a product had to be available for purchase during the 2007 calendar year. The six winners were chosen by a distinguished panel of experts who evaluated the nominees for their degree of technical innovation and commercial significance, in addition to their potential for positive social impact:

Display Component of the Year

Gold Award: Luminus Devices PhlatLight LED Backlight Unit
Luminus Devices this year topped the balloting with the PhlatLight backlight unit (BLU) for liquid-crystal display (LCD) TVs. Developed with Global Lighting Technology, the PhlatLight BLU integrates Luminus' PhlatLight LEDs with Microlens light guides from Global Lighting Technology, thus requiring only eight RGB chipsets to illuminate a large-screen LCD display.

Silver Award: FUJIFILM Corp. WV-EA Film
Twisted-nematic (TN) mode thin-film transistor (TFT)-LCDs are popular and widely applied in PC monitors because of its high-light transmittance, relatively fast response time, ease of manufacture and cost effectiveness. However, TN-mode LCDs did not have enough viewing-angle performance compared to other LCD modes. The most successful method to solve TN-mode's weak point was the use of Wide View (WV) film by FUJIFILM Corporation. The WV film is an optical compensation film that enhances the viewing-angle performance of TN-mode LCDs, allowing users to see clear images at oblique angles.

Display Device of the Year

Gold Award: Sony Corp. XEL-1 OLED TV
The XEL-1 from Sony Corp. is the world's first organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TV. The 11-inch (diagonal) XEL-1 is just 3mm at its thinnest point and offers superior picture quality via Sony's independently developed Organic Panel, which delivers a host of advantages, including high contrast, peak brightness and color reproduction, as well as rapid response time. The OLED display panel's light-emitting structure eliminates both the mercury associated with traditional backlighting and the need for a separate light source, enabling extremely low power consumption.

Silver Award: Samsung SDI 2.2-inch QVGA AMOLED Display
Operating on the principle that a display can never be too (feature) rich or too thin, Samsung SDI Co., Ltd. introduced the world's thinnest 2.2-inch active-matrix OLED (AMOLED) display. Just 0.52 mm thick, no more than a business card, the QVGA (320 by 240 resolution) AMOLED has 100-percent color gamut, can realize high-speed, full-color (262K) video images, and can project images on brightness ratio ranging from 10,000 to 1.

Display Application of the Year

Gold Award: Apple Inc., iPhone
iPhone combines three products: a mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and an Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, searching and maps into a single small, lightweight handheld device. The iPhone's user interface is based on a large Multi-Touch display and revolutionary software that completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones.

Silver Award: RealD Stereoscopic 3D Cinema Technology
Recently named one of the world's most innovative companies by Fast Company magazine, RealD is revolutionizing the cinema industry with its stereoscopic 3D technology, which turns movie-going into a uniquely near-tactile experience—far different from the gimmick-filled films of old that come to mind when one thinks of 3D. The RealD system uses a single projector but places an active filter, which can switch between two different types of polarization, in front of the projection lens. This allows the viewer to wear much simpler and more lightweight passive glasses.

For more information, please visit www.sid.org.