Roll Up for the Floppy Television
Fri Jul 19, 2:06 PM ET
By Pete Harrison

LONDON (Reuters) - First they went wider, then flatter, and now televisions are set to go floppy.

Roll-up, flexible televisions, akin to the melting watches of Salvador Dali's surreal landscapes, have become possible thanks to a glowing plastic compound perfected in the laboratories of Britain's Cambridge Display Technology (CDT).

Roll-up televisions will allow viewers of the future to flip their sets out of sight like projector screens and will come with a similar price tag to bulkier boxes.

The technology stems from the discovery in 1989 of the compound p-phenylenevinylene which glows greeny-yellow when given an electric charge.

A little tweaking over the following decade produced compounds to emit blue and red light: the roll-up TV was born.

The market for light emitting screens is expected to grow from $20-25 million in 2000 to over $3 billion by 2005, and CDT's Light Emitting Polymer (LEP) screens are expected to grab a majority chunk of that.

"I think it (commercial production) is very close now," said Fyfe, adding that the last bottleneck -- finding a flexi-screen that protects the sensitive compounds from corrosion by oxygen and water vapour -- had almost been overcome.

"Realistically, you will see roll up displays around 2004 or 2005," he added.

"Just four weeks ago Philips demonstrated an all plastic display -- an incredible thing -- a device only a fifty millionth of an inch thick," said Fyfe. "If you can get thin enough plastic, then you would indeed have a roll-up television."

The Japanese giants of television manufacturing, Sony, Hitachi and Toshiba, are leading the race to put the technology to use, but not far behind is the military, which envisions roll-up maps of the battlefield fed by overhead satellites.

"They're interested in every ounce that can be saved from a soldier's pack," said Fyfe. With the flick of a switch the display could convert to infra-red for covert night operations.
On the home front, TV-watches, giant animated billboards, and a new wave of roll-up battery rechargers are just some of the applications in the pipeline.

"I think we'll see a lot of innovation," said Fyfe. "People are talking about weaving displays into clothing. Will there ever be a mass market for that? I doubt it. But it will probably be seized on by someone."