2017 is coming to an end, and the entire display industry is thriving with numerous technologies emerging one after another. In this ever-changing era, every enterprise is forging ahead, contributing its own strength to the entire industry and to humanity as a whole. Now, let's take a look at the top ten buzzwords in the display industry throughout 2017 with the editor.

1. OLED

OLED screens have gradually matured this year, and under the trend of full-screen displays, OLED has ushered in a booming development.

OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) is also known as organic electroluminescent display or organic light-emitting semiconductor. It was discovered in the laboratory by Chinese-American professor Ching W. Tang in 1979. OLED display technology has advantages such as self-luminescence, wide viewing angle, almost infinitely high contrast, low power consumption, and extremely high response speed. However, as a high-end display, it is more expensive than LCD TVs.

In the second half of this year, Apple released the iPhone X equipped with an AMOLED screen, which caused a sensation in the OLED industry. It is expected that a large number of mobile phones following the trend of using OLED screens will be launched next year.

However, regardless of what happens, OLED will be an inevitable direction for future development.

2. Laser TV

A new concept quietly emerged this year, that is, laser TV, and many manufacturers have launched corresponding products.

Simply put, a laser TV is a laser light source projector that adopts reflective ultra-short throw projection technology. Its hardware includes the projector itself and a projection screen. Due to the use of a laser light source, its display purity and brightness are higher, and it can present excellent images even in high-brightness environments. Breaking the limitation of the traditional "screen", laser TV has obvious advantages in terms of size expansion. LCD TV technology has been applied for nearly ten years, but generally, LCD TVs can barely reach 100 inches, while laser TVs can easily achieve larger sizes.

At present, Xiaomi Home, KanShang, Hisense, and XGIMI have successively launched their own laser TVs, hoping to gain an early advantage in this emerging market.

3. 3D Glass

The vigorous development of smartphones has also driven the progress of the mobile phone panel market, and the glass cover on mobile phones is no exception. Driven by the curved screens of Samsung and Xiaomi, 3D glass has become a selling point for mobile phone practitioners, and they will naturally not give it up.

Benefiting from the OLED panel and glass back cover markets, 3D glass has become a market favorite this year, with many industry leaders investing in setting up factories for it. It can not only be used on curved mobile phones but also has a place in curved TVs.

However, with the development of full-screen displays recently, most full-screen mobile phones have abandoned the curved design, so the fate of 3D glass in smartphones is unpredictable.

4. LTPS

LTPS (Low Temperature Poly-silicon) is a low-temperature polysilicon technology. It is formed when amorphous silicon is uniformly irradiated by laser light, and the internal atoms of the amorphous silicon absorb energy, undergo energy level transition and deformation, and become a polycrystalline structure.

LTPS has higher electron mobility, so display devices using this technology have higher resolution, faster response speed, and higher brightness. The greatest advantage of this technology lies in its perfect matching with OLED. The molecular structure of polysilicon in a grain is arranged neatly and directionally, so the electron mobility is 200-300 times faster than that of amorphous silicon with disordered arrangement. Since OLED is current-driven and has high requirements on the conductivity of the substrate, only LTPS can meet the requirements.

At present, LTPS is suitable for small and medium-sized high-end LCD panels and AMOLED panels that require higher resolution and electron mobility. As more and more smartphones adopt AMOLED panels, the market prospect of this technology is very broad.

5. 8K Display

With the continuous upgrading of current display technologies, people's requirements for viewing are also increasing. From the initial 480P, to 720P, then to 1080P, 2K, and 4K, the images are becoming more and more delicate and rich, allowing us to see a more real world in videos.

However, due to defects in the 4K standard, its effect is not much different from 1080P. 8K will bring huge changes from vision to hearing. Moreover, at this year's CES and AWE exhibitions, we have seen many 8K TVs, and Sharp and BOE are currently vigorously developing 8K product lines.

6. LCD

LCD is an established display technology and currently still occupies the majority of the display panel market share, and this situation will not change in the short term.

LCD (abbreviation of Liquid Crystal Display) is a liquid crystal display. Its structure is that a liquid crystal cell is placed between two parallel glass substrates. A TFT (Thin Film Transistor) is set on the lower glass substrate, and a color filter is set on the upper glass substrate. By changing the signal and voltage on the TFT, the rotation direction of liquid crystal molecules is controlled, thereby controlling whether the polarized light of each pixel is emitted to achieve the display purpose.

Now LCD has replaced CRT as the mainstream, its price has dropped a lot, and it has been fully popularized. However, Samsung and LG are reducing their LCD production lines and switching to producing AMOLED, so domestic manufacturers can fill the market gap left by them at this time.

7. Full-Screen Display

If last year was the first year of full-screen displays, then this year is the year of the explosion of full-screen displays. Almost all mobile phone manufacturers launched their own full-screen mobile phones this year. Nowadays, when holding a press conference, if you don't mention full-screen displays, it seems that you are not part of the mobile phone industry.

Since the technical difficulties of full-screen displays are relatively not high, but the visual impact is strong, and the cost performance is relatively good, it is not surprising that all manufacturers have unanimously chosen to develop full-screen displays as differentiated products.

However, it is worth mentioning that there is currently no real full-screen mobile phone product on the market; it's just that the screen-to-body ratio of current screens is larger than that of previous ones. From the perspective of current technology, there is still a long way to go for a real full-screen mobile phone.

8. Micro LED

OLED is a development direction for future screens, but it is not the only one. In this regard, Micro LED is obviously not inferior to OLED.

Micro LED displays use micron-level LED sizes, can independently control pixels and emit light individually, and have characteristics such as high brightness, low power consumption, ultra-high resolution, and high color gamut. If combined with nano-wiring, even ultra-small LEDs can achieve the characteristics of bendable flexible screens.

At present, the biggest bottleneck in the mass production of Micro LED displays is how to transfer a large number of micron-sized LEDs to the circuit substrate (Backplane), which is called Mass Transfer. Although the huge advantages shown by Micro LED have attracted the attention of major global display manufacturers, semiconductor manufacturers, and LED manufacturers, all manufacturers are stepping up the development of breakthrough technologies to overcome the bottleneck in Micro LED mass production, hoping to take the lead in the market.

9. Quantum Dots

Quantum dots are artificial nanocrystals with semiconductor properties, which can be used to enhance the brightness and color performance of static and video images displayed on LCD screens.

Quantum dots realize image display by emitting particles (similar to phosphors on plasma TVs). When they are hit by photons from an external light source, each quantum dot emits light of a specific bandwidth (determined by the size of the quantum dot).

Larger quantum dots emit light that is more red, and as the size of quantum dots decreases, the light they emit tends to be green. When quantum dots of specified sizes are combined in a structure and combined with a blue LED light source, they can emit the entire color bandwidth required for TV viewing. Using the characteristics of quantum dots, TV manufacturers can improve the brightness and color performance of LCD TVs beyond the current level.

Affected by OLED, the performance of LCD in the market has been somewhat sluggish, but with the introduction of quantum dot technology, it is believed that LCD will continue to glow with new life.

10. LED

As an LED display enterprise, only by having "products that can be shown off" or "products that people can think of when they think of you" can it truly gain a foothold in the market and be admired by others.

This year, with the vigorous development of OLED, QLED, and Micro LED, traditional LEDs have gradually faded from people's attention, but all the above-mentioned new technologies have evolved from LEDs.

Moreover, this year LEDs have gradually been applied in more fields, and countless new types of LEDs have been developed. For example, transparent LED displays and LED strip lighting have gained new vitality on this basis. It is believed that LED technology will not become obsolete for a long time.