SCREEN PRESENCE

Modern tech life teems with longstanding quandaries, questions that never seem to go away. Mac or Windows? Turn off the computer every night or let it sleep? Plasma or LCD?

Fortunately, that last question will soon have an answer. There’s a new TV on the block, and its picture is so amazing, it makes plasma and LCD look like cave drawings.

It’s called organic light emitting diode, or OLED. This technology has been happily lighting up the screens of certain cellphone and music-player models for a couple of years now, but Sony is the first company to offer it in a TV screen. It’s called the XEL-1, and it’s available only from SonyStyle stores. Its picture is so incredible, Sony should include a jaw cushion.

The XEL-1’s picture is so colourful, vibrant, rich, lifelike and high in contrast, you catch your breath. It’s like looking out of a window. With the glass missing.

Name a drawback of plasma or LCD—motion blur, uneven lighting across the panel, blacks that aren’t quite black, whites that aren’t quite white, limited viewing angle, colour that isn’t quite true, brightness that washes out in bright rooms, screen-door effect up close—and this TV overcomes it.

(If you’re a TV-technology geek and you’re getting a distinct feeling of déjà vu, congratulations. All of this does sound exactly like the descriptions of SED television prototypes demonstrated years ago by Toshiba and Canon. Unfortunately, that equally impressive picture technology never made it out of the lab.)

To make this thing even more drool-worthy, the XEL-1’s screen is only three millimeters thick—shirt-cardboard thick. The reason: in an OLED screen, each pixel generates its own light; there’s no need for bulky backlights, as there are in LCD sets.

Finally, OLED uses less electricity than either plasma or LCD.

So, if this thing is so amazing, why isn’t everyone stampeding to get one?

Because even though the XEL-1 is the biggest OLED television you can buy today, it’s only an 11-inch screen. That’s not a typo; it’s smaller than your laptop screen. Oh, and it costs $2,500.

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