QD Vision Enables New Displays with Wider Color Gamut
June 3, 2015, Santa Clara, CA—John Volkmann from QD Vision talked about the company’s ability to enable new displays through the use of quantum dot phosphors. The underlying technology absorbs light at a specific frequency and re-emits light at other colors.
The main products are built as LED edge light bars for use in various types of displays such as mobile, desktop monitors, etc. They worked with MMD (Philips Monitors) on a desktop monitor that achieves 99 percent of Adobe RGB color. This 27-inch display has full HD resolution to deliver bright colors and life-like images. The QD Color IQ light bars provide a broad spectrum backlight to enable the improved images.
In partnership with Hisense, they developed a 55-inch curved quantum dot TV. The resulting TV achieves greater than 100 percent of the NTSC color gamut for brighter and more vivid images. The two companies are working on other products and enhanced technologies for those new devices. Both the MMD monitor and Hisense TV are currently available in China, and will be entering other markets in the future.
The quantum dot technology helps the display manufacturers reduce costs by using only a single color LED for the backlighting and is very cost effective compared to other high gamut technologies like OLED. The chemistries within the dots can be tuned for specific color outputs, which enables high-intensity, high-saturation displays. The configuration for the ColorIQ light bar allows for simple integration into displays and uses standard LED arrays for excitation of the quantum dot phosphors.
The use of LEDs for backlighting is fine for the current generation of screens but will need to be greatly enhanced to meet the expected light intensities in the proposed UHD standards. Getting the color gamut may be the easier part of the developments for UHD, as conversion efficiency or brighter excitation may be needed to get to the 1000 nits in the next generation. The use of an edge-light configuration prohibits local dimming, so the LCD panels will need further improvements to display the high dynamic range images.
Industry trends for wider gamut and higher color saturation will cause more display makers to move to technologies like quantum dots to get a wider color gamut. Some industry analysts forecast that half of all displays will use quantum dot technologies by 2025. The potential alternatives to quantum dots currently have reliability and efficiency issues, as well as higher manufacturing and operating costs.
