Eastman Kodak Company
Kodak Wins Innovation Award for Active-Matrix OLED Display
Influential Chip Magazine Sees the Bright Light of Kodak's OLED Technology
ROCHESTER, N.Y., March 19 -- Eastman Kodak Company has won this year's Chip Award for Innovation for its organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology.
The Chip awards each year recognize the best and most innovative products and technologies at the CeBIT fair. The awards, established in 1993, are meant to encourage innovation and boldness in the computer industry. Chip is Germany's most important computer magazine with a circulation of 1.4 million readers, and its awards carry a high level of prestige at CeBIT and throughout Europe.
"This recognition, from such an influential publication, underscores the importance of OLED technology to bring images to life in consumer electronics and other devices," said Bernard Masson, senior vice president, Eastman Kodak Company, and president, Display Group. "The recognition validates Kodak's strategy to grow the company by creating this new business."
At the CeBIT in Hannover, Germany, Kodak showed the first product to feature an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display, the Kodak EasyShare LS633 zoom digital camera. The camera's OLED display features a wide viewing angle for optimal picture sharing from almost any angle. In addition, the colors are brighter and more vivid, and the combination of brilliant color and high contrast make the images appear sharper, identifying key detail is easier.
In addition, Kodak demonstrated a 15-inch, 1280 x 720-pixel prototype display, pointing the way to future fields of applications. This prototype is the latest product of Kodak's four-year Joint Development Agreement (JDA) with Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd., to combine Kodak's OLED materials and technology with Sanyo's high-quality, low-temperature polysilicon substrate technology. The JDA team also produced the first full-color 2.4-inch active matrix OLED display in 1999 and less than a year later, a 5.5-inch active matrix OLED. Their joint manufacturing venture, SK Display Corp., produced the world's first active-matrix OLED displays for Kodak's evaluation kit and is manufacturing displays for the Kodak EasyShare LS633 zoom digital camera.
OLED Technology
OLED displays comprise self-luminous pixels, requiring no backlights used in liquid crystal displays (LCDs). So they offer design and performance advantages, including clearer images, crisper video, and thinner designs in digital cameras, mobile phones, PDAs and other devices. Additional benefits over conventional technologies include higher contrast for superb readability in most lighting conditions, faster response time to support streaming video, and a viewing angle of up to 180 degrees for superior ergonomics. In addition to the joint manufacturing venture for active-matrix OLED panels with Sanyo, Kodak licenses OLED technology to more than one dozen display and device manufacturers worldwide. For further information on Kodak displays and licensees, go to http://www.kodak.com/go/display/.
About Kodak and Infoimaging
Kodak is the leader in helping people take, share, enhance, preserve, print and enjoy pictures -- for memories, for information, for entertainment. The company is a major participant in infoimaging a $385 billion industry composed of devices (digital cameras, printer docks and PDAs), infrastructure (online networks and delivery systems for images) and services & media (EasyShare software, film and paper enabling people to access, analyze and print images). Kodak harnesses its technology, market reach and a host of industry partnerships to provide innovative products and services for customers who need the information-rich content that images contain. The company, with sales in 2002 of $12.8 billion, is organized into four major businesses: Photography, providing consumers, professionals and cinematographers with digital and traditional products and services; Commercial Imaging, offering image capture, output and storage products and services to businesses and government; Components, delivering flat-panel displays, optics and sensors to original equipment manufacturers; and Health, supplying the healthcare industry with traditional and digital image capture and output products and services.