Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Exciting Times Ahead for ID and Our Industry

2019; Wiley; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/msid.1001

2637-496X

Stephen P. Atwood,

Big Data and Business Intelligence

Happy New Year and welcome to our first issue for 2019. I hope everyone had a great holiday season. With the new year comes change, as we welcome our new Managing Editor Nicole Saunders. Nicole brings a wide range of publishing experience, from both consumer and trade titles, to the role. I can already say it’s been a great experience working with her on this issue, and I’m sure she is going to be a nice addition to our Information Display team. It was February 2009 when we first welcomed Jenny Donelan into the fold, and I wrote that I hoped she had “…found here a working home she can be comfortable in for a long time.” Well, she certainly did, and over 10 years she has made countless significant contributions to this publication that we are truly grateful for. It’s been a great pleasure working with her on this enterprise, and I send her my heartfelt thanks for all that she has done! Fortunately, Jenny isn’t completely leaving us. In fact, she has several bylines in this issue and will continue to write for us and support a variety of other SID activities going forward. There are other changes coming as well, including a redesigned Information Display website, a new look to the print layout, and a renewed emphasis on business coverage as well as industry news. I hope these changes help ID continue to be a trusted source of technology and industry education. This is an exciting time for our humble society under the leadership of our President Helge Seetzen. In this month’s President’s Corner, Helge talks about how important volunteers are to the future of SID and provides updates on our steps to improve diversity and increase our membership. The future starts with students, and we are doing more each year to engage them and help them grow into successful contributors to our industry. Our technical theme this issue is high-performance displays. Of course, you could say that just about all the displays we use could be called high-performance. The evolution in color, resolution, pixel density, and other parameters over the past few years has made even a small cellphone capable of full HD resolution or higher. Despite this, there is still room for improvement. On that front, our guest editors, the duo of Timo Kunkel and Robert Wanat from Dolby Laboratories, Inc., have brought us a really compelling lineup of articles that address opportunities for further advancement of display performance. In their guest editorial, Timo and Robert explain how users’ expectations have continued to evolve and how developers are focusing on critical aspects of display performance to meet those expectations. We begin our lineup with their very comprehensive Frontline Technology feature “Achieving and Maintaining Perceptual Intent with HDR Imaging,” which answers the question “Why do I need HDR?” Timo and Robert do a great job explaining the nature of HDR and how to manage both luminance and color spaces to create images that more realistically render our natural world. Dolby Labs is clearly taking the lead in this space, and I congratulate them on their substantial investment in the next generation of high-performance displays. Tara Akhavan, who has been a good friend and supporter of ID for several years now, has been working on a new technology for the improvement of display readability under challenging ambient conditions, appropriately titled Perceptual Display Platform. Tara has shown demonstrations of this technology in the Display Week I-Zone and it has garnered considerable attention. In this issue, she and her colleagues Hyunjin Yoo and Andrei Chubarau describe how their innovation works when applied to the very challenging environment of automotive displays. Their approach shows how real image fidelity can be maintained under extremely high and low ambient situations and that even the age of the observer can be taken into consideration. I hope you enjoy their Frontline Technology feature titled “Solving Challenges and Improving the Performance of Automotive Displays.” If you’ve been shopping for TVs this year you know that 4K sets are all around—and that they’re very affordable. There isn’t a lot of 4K content out there yet, but I would agree with those who say that 2K HD content looks better on a 4K TV. The manufacturers of TVs seem to be ever searching for that next killer feature that makes everyone want to upgrade to a new one. I understand it, and frankly I’ve been swayed by, for example, the built-in streaming capabilities as well as the stunning improvements in color gamut. When I heard about the movement toward 8K technology, I was skeptical. But Jenny Donelan enthusiastically agreed to reach out to the industry to understand how far along this 8K evolution has come. We offer her well-researched Enabling Technology feature titled “The State of 8K” for your enjoyment. Of course, the common reaction of many people is that beyond a certain pixel density and viewing distance, even the best observers cannot see the individual pixel array anyway, so how does additional resolution in the screen make a difference? Well, I don’t know, frankly. But many anecdotal observations say that it does, and Jenny explores some of those in her article. She also points out how the content side is moving quickly this way, at least in image capture and post-processing. Bandwidth to the screen is the problem right now, and only platforms like direct broadcast satellite and fiber optic networks are in a position to provide these streams today. But all technology marches on in some form of Moore’s Law of compliance, and digital bandwidths to homes will continue to increase. After reading Jenny’s account, I suspect you will agree that 8K is very close, and yes, even 16K is not too far out there. While TVs yearn for higher resolution, most portable devices yearn to be flexible. I can hardly remember a time when flexible displays and electronics have not been a subject of research, and recently we’ve seen some very cool demonstrations. One innovator that we’ve talked about before in these pages is Plastic Logic, who has been working on organic TFT (OTFT) arrays on plastic substrates since the early 2000s. The company was recently reorganized as FlexEnable, which is based in Cambridge, UK, and focuses on transferring its OTFT formulas to major display makers in Asia. To understand what is going on and how they are doing it, Jenny Donelan spoke with their CEO Chuck Milligan. As virtually all of us know, it’s not enough to have great technology. It takes great people, funding, partnerships, infrastructure, supply chains, and willing consumers to make a successful business. Flex-Enable appears to be close to putting that formula together and I’m sure you will enjoy the insights shared by Chuck in this interview. To get a perspective on the year ahead, we asked new contributor Glen Dickson to examine the key trends and hot topics for displays. He reports three important trends to follow in the coming year involving flexible displays, OLED TVs, and the further growth of automotive applications. Please enjoy Glen’s Business of Displays feature suitably titled “The Year Ahead.” As always, I invite you to also enjoy our regular departments, such as SID News and Industry News. We also have two great book reviews, including one that covers a recent addition to our SID/Wiley book series. So, with that lineup, another wonderful year begins. Coming next month is one of my most favorite issues of the year, where we announce the winners of our SID Honors and Awards. With so many great contributions it’s almost impossible to pick favorites, but each year the Honors and Awards Committee does its best to name some standout recipients. We’ll know who they are shortly and then get to work profiling them for you. I hope you all find good health and much prosperity in 2019.