LG Philips LCD: flexible screens in oil and water

The joint venture LG Philips announced the completion of the development of another variation of a flexible display on a plastic substrate. Water and oil are used to generate the image in these flexible displays.


LG Philips developers managed to circumvent one of the main problems of producing such displays, which is to achieve temperatures (required for OLED creation) that are greater than the melting point of the plastic substrate. The solution, invented by scientists, is nontrivial: instead of creating pixels on the screens of OLED-elements, they perform them from water and oil contained in small plastic cells connected to the electrodes. Light-tight oil flows over the water and, more than that, shadows the color surface below it. By applying an electric field, you can push the oil out of the water and open the colored layer under it.

The disadvantage of this screen is that the rate of change of its state is still very small. To display a static picture such displays can already be used, but the dynamics are not yet available.

via New Scientist Tech