LED light bulbs, with their minuscule energy consumption and 20-year life expectancy, have grabbed the consumer’s imagination.
Future vision: 1. An Oled installation by Hannes Koch, who says the technology will ‘change the quality of light in public and private spaces’; 2. Students at the Cleveland Institute of Art have developed flexible, paper-thin Oled technology on safety outerwear; 3. A flexible blue Oled at GE’s global research centre in Niskayuna, New York; 4. A lamp by designer Ingo Maurer, which costs about $10,000, uses 10 Oled panels.
However, an even newer technology is intriguing the world’s lighting designers: Organic light-emitting diodes (Oleds) create long-lasting, highly efficient illumination in a wide range of colours, just like their inorganic cousins, LEDs. But unlike LEDs, which provide points of light like standard incandescent bulbs, Oleds create uniform, diffuse light across ultra-thin sheets of material that can eventually even be made flexible.
Ingo Maurer, a lighting designer with studios in Munich and New York, who has designed chandeliers of shattered plates and light bulbs with bird wings, is using 10 Oled panels in a table lamp shaped like a tree. The first of its kind, it sells for about $10,000 (Rs4.8 lakh).
Maurer is thinking of other uses. “If you make a wall-divider with Oled panels, it can be extremely decorative. I would combine it with point light sources,” he says. Other designers have thought about putting them in ceiling tiles or in Venetian blinds so that after dusk, a room looks as if sunshine is still streaming in.
Today, Oleds are used in a few cellphones, such as the Impression from Samsung, and for small, expensive, ultra-thin TV sets from Sony (and soon, from LG). Sony’s only Oled television set, with an 11-inch screen, costs $2,500.
Oled displays produce a high-resolution picture with wider viewing angles than LCD screens. In 2008, seven million of the one billion cellphones sold worldwide used Oled screens, according to Jennifer Colegrove, an analyst at DisplaySearch, a research firm. She predicts next year that that number will jump at least sevenfold to 50 million phones.
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But Oled lighting may be the most promising market. Within a year, manufacturers expect to sell the first Oled sheets that will one day illuminate large residential and commercial spaces. Eventually, they will be as energy-efficient and long-lasting as LED bulbs, they say.
Qualitative change
Because of the diffuse, even light that Oleds emit, they will supplement, rather than replace, other energy-efficient technologies, such as LED, compact fluorescent and advanced incandescent bulbs that create light from a single small point.
Its use may be limited at first, according to designers, and not just because of its high price. “Oled lighting is even and monotonous,” says Maurer. “It has no drama; it misses the spiritual side.”