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eMagin Advocates Virtually Large Screen OLED Microdisplays for Entertainment (2/8/2004)

Affirms Commitment to Near-Eye Consumer Applications at Intertech Home Entertainment Display Conference

eMagin Corporation (AMEX:EMA), the leading manufacturer of active matrix OLED microdisplays, announced that the company will present today at Intertech's Large Screen Displays for Home Entertainment Conference in San Diego, California. At the annual conference which highlights markets, technological advances, and applications of physically large screens, Gary Jones, chief executive officer, will provide an alternative perspective of miniature microdisplays for portable, virtually large screen views.

Affirming eMagin's commitment to developing OLED microdisplays for consumer applications, Mr. Jones notes that getting a large-display experience need not imply "more weight and less portability."

"It's time to think beyond the border imposed by typical fixed screens. Whether it's 12 inches or 72 inches, there's still a border, a limit," said Mr. Jones. "We will talk about the large screen experience where the effective usable size can be almost anything and wrap around you. At eMagin, we challenge ourselves to think beyond the edges."

Mr. Jones noted that the company has demonstrated a binocular headset that delivered 3D stereovision in effective full-surround so that a viewer could see left and right, up and down, and behind with a simple turn or nod of the head. This can provide the effect of hundreds of displays placed all around the user.

"It's taken time to develop the right combination of technologies," said Jones, citing early efforts at virtual reality headsets that relied on heavy CRTs or LCDs that demanded a lot of power and delivered images plagued by flicker. "Displays were the weakest link, which is being overcome by eMagin's OLED on silicon SVGA+ and SVGA-3D displays, but there were other issues which slowed the progress toward this surround view concept. These encumbrances include slow processors not optimized for video and complex requirements for video processing, head tracking, difficult small field or heavy optics, large amounts of processing for stereovision, and high power where batteries, charges and even heat were major issues."

"Technology developments have now converged to move beyond those issues. Microprocessors are faster, plug-and-play surround imaging is closer to reality, precision large field optics are now moldable with new equipment, and video and audio are standard. OLED microdisplays are one more key development, and they can draw all the power they need through the USB port. And they deliver, in a compact size, brilliant, high speed color video and very high contrast with no flicker."

"They're easy on the eye and have simple system requirements. That's why more than 30 products currently use eMagin OLED displays, primarily first for a diverse array of industrial, medical, and military applications, but with many more products in development for high volume consumer uses."

In addition to discussing market opportunities, Mr. Jones is providing an overview of the technology, which entails a layer of emissive organic light-emitting diode material on a silicon chip. Once charged each pixel illuminates immediately at speeds about 1000x that of LCDs at a fraction of the power.

"For many consumer applications - from television to personal computing to electronic gaming - OLED microdisplays offer a borderless viewing experience," said Mr. Jones.

www.emagin.com