The OLED TV reaches productionFollow

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/business/23novelties.html?ref=business

This is potentially huge in terms of the future of display technology. Currently, everything with a LCD, from your cell phone to your computer screen uses a backlight. That backlight is the biggest power draw of the whole device, and is the main challenge to battery life designers. An OLED, or Organic Light Emitting Diode uses basically a form of phosphoroluminescent lichen to light the display instead. Entirely eliminating that power draw in the process. With the new Lithium Polymer batteries that are starting to make an appearance in devices, this could potentially be huge in terms of laptop and cell phone design. I doubt you will see batteries much smaller than they are currently, but with the same size Lithium Polymer battery and an OLED display, i'd expect laptop life to go from hours, to days.

From what I can tell, it will take some time before the technology is advanced and stable enough to be used on devices such as laptops, etc.. It's interesting that they actually have a product out to market already, and it will be even more interesting to see how it fares with early adopters.

Having said that, I think one of the original design ideas/goals for this technology was to be able to produce large scale "printable" screens for things like full motion video on billboards, building walls, and yes, product packaging. I don't think they'll be competing for home video displays any time soon, but that's just my opinion. Curious technology, it is.

OLED has been around for a bit in the Cell phone world. Not so much in the states but in the far east markets it's been popular. I do believe I heard the new iPod's have oled screens but I find that very hard to believe. I'm really excited for this after the whole SED fiasco.