Sony XEL-1 OLED teardown
posted Apr 17th 2008 9:45pm by Eliot Phillipsfiled under: home entertainment hacks

[bunnie] just happened to be at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose on exactly the right day to witness the live teardown of a Sony XEL-1 OLED TV. The XEL-1 is Sony’s flagship OLED panel that’s only 3mm thick… and $2500 for just an 11-inch screen. [bunnie] was able to take quite a few shots of the components as they were passed around. He pointed out a few interesting bits about the construction. There seems to be quite a bit of thermal material on the display to prevent “avalanche thermal failures” (which I’m guessing doesn’t look as cool as it sounds). OLED displays are completely transparent and their legendary contrast ratio is just a result of the dark backing material. The mainboard seems to be a bit of overkill for this TV and [bunnie] concludes that it’s just the standard image engine architecture from Sony’s Bravia line put into a smaller package.





OLED’s are quite sexy. Just really expensive now. LCD panels finally got into the sane range of price; can we expect oled’s to fall thusly in the coming decade? I hope they solve the short lifespan problems soon, too.
Posted at 11:10 pm on Apr 17th, 2008 by PocketBrain