Planar bowed what it called an industry-first seamless LED touch-enabled video wall at NAB, it said in a Monday announcement. The multi-touch solution, said to offer interactivity without the disadvantages of front glass, enables collaborative applications that had been the sole domain of LCD displays, the company said. Leyard LED MultiTouch is scalable to LED video walls up to 196 inches for settings including broadcast, corporate and education, the company said.

Nanosys will use the Display Week 2017 conference in Los Angeles to showcase its “next-gen” photo-emissive quantum-dot technology, both in show-floor demos and in a paper to be presented at the event’s technical symposium, Jeff Yurek, Nanosys director-marketing and investor relations, emailed us Monday. Nanosys showcased its photo-emissive quantum-dot innovation at CES, trumpeting it as a color filter replacement technology that’s capable of boosting a TV’s energy efficiency by a factor of three and is adaptable with multiple display architectures. Yurek declined comment on the company’s commercialization plans for “TrueQ,” a name for which it applied in February to register as a trademark. Patent and Trademark Office records show. Nanosys has a recent practice of applying to trademark terms it formally debuts soon after at Display Week or other industry conferences. On May 20, for example, Nanosys applied at PTO to register the name “Hyperion,” and days later used Display Week in San Francisco to announce Hyperion as a new quantum-dot material system “that represents a significant development breakthrough in unlocking the market for displays” meeting the BT.2020 wide color gamut standard. Display Week 2017 opens May 21 at the Los Angeles Convention Center for a six-day run.

E Ink and Sony Semiconductor Solutions formed a joint venture to develop, produce, sell and license products that use electronic paper displays, the companies said in a Monday announcement. The relationship between E Ink and Sony dates back to 2004, when Sony shipped the first CE application of Philips’ electronic paper display technology in an e-reader based on E Ink’s electronic ink know-how (see 0403290117). The joint venture will “leverage” E Ink’s development and manufacturing technology for electronic paper displays and Sony’s expertise in product development and marketing, the companies said: “By doing so, it will aim to create new electronic paper display products and systems, and grow the market of ePaper-based solutions.”

The global OLED display market will reach a compound annual growth rate of nearly 22 percent by 2021, driven by mobile devices, TVs and wearables, said a Technavio report. The three categories made up 86 percent of the market last year, it said. Manufacturers are shifting to OLED production due to falling profitability in LCDs and OLEDs’ low power consumption and consumer preferences for slimmer electronics, it said.

With “design work” increasingly taking place to create devices with flexible and bendable displays, the “indium tin oxide technology currently in broad use is not optimal for flexible and foldable applications,” UniPixel CEO Jeff Hawthorne said on a Thursday earnings call. UniPixel’s XTouch metal mesh sensors and Diamond Guard coating “are well suited for this type of application,” he said. The company’s internal testing “has yielded no performance degradation of our XTouch sensors” in tests of up to 200,000 folds at a 2-mm radius, he said. “We believe that this ability to conform to certain shapes will become prominent in broad applications, including wearables, smartphones and automotive applications, among others.”

Sharp Imaging and Information will showcase its professional displays at the 2017 Digital Signage Expo beginning Wednesday in Las Vegas, said the company in a Monday announcement. The expanded line, with 20 new models for 2017, includes 60- and 70-inch models in the PN-R line with the Intel Mini Open Pluggable Specification technology, HDBaseT connectivity and wireless and computing modules, said the company. A new PN-Y series, with many features of the PN-R models, will come out at a more economical price point, it said. Sharp also will preview a 70-inch ultra-thin-bezel video wall monitor, scheduled for launch this fall, that yields a 119-inch image when displayed in a 1x3 array, it said.

Futuresource sees flexible display sales surging to become a $200 billion global market opportunity within five years, creating “radical new product concepts,” the research firm said in a Thursday report. Smartphones that unfold to become tablets and adjustable curved TVs are two examples of the novel form factors “made possible by advances in flexible display technology,” it said. “New materials and design processes will drive innovation and, in some cases, completely new usage models,” it said. It estimates more than a quarter of new smartphones introduced by 2026 will have flexible screens, which, among their other attributes, “will render them unbreakable,” it said. The strong growth in flexible display shipments is anticipated due to the “range of product benefits” the flexibility creates, it said.

The Society for Information Display will mark 30 years of “OLED achievements” by hosting a commemorative event May 23 during its Display Week 2017 conference in Los Angeles, SID said in a Wednesday announcement. Called “Lighting the Way: Celebrating 30 Years of OLED," the event will highlight “the dynamic history of this technology, from its early R&D days to its evolution as a major force in the display industry,” said SID. Display Week also will feature “dozens of sessions and speakers from across industry and academia” presenting their latest OLED innovations “and what's in store for the future of this technology,” it said. Display Week opens May 21 at the Los Angeles Convention Center for a six-day run.

Next-generation displays will feature increased resolution and performance, but getting there will require “a tightening of the tolerance for glass relaxation,” said a study published Tuesday in the Journal of Chemical Physics. Display manufacturers can account for a certain level of relaxation in the glass, if it’s known and reproducible, said the study, which was co-written by engineers from Corning and Qilu University of Technology in Jinan, China. Fluctuations in the relaxation behavior of glass tend to introduce uncertainty into the manufacturing process, possibly leading to misalignment of pixels within displays, the study said. But research has been lacking into what governs fluctuations in the relaxation behavior of glass and how the fluctuations can be predicted and accounted for in the production process, it said. “Glass is a thermodynamically unstable material that continually relaxes toward the supercooled liquid state,” said John Mauro, Corning senior research manager-glass research, one of the study’s authors, in a statement. “This relaxation is a spontaneous process that’s accelerated during heat treatment.” The study focuses on how much the magnitude of the relaxation varies due to slight thermal variations experienced by the glass -- either during the initial glass formation or during the panel manufacturing process, Mauro said. Determining the parameters that control relaxation fluctuations should help guide future glass composition, he said.

UniPixel got “positive results” from the in-house testing of its XTouch touch-screen sensors for use in future flexible and foldable display devices such as smartphones, tablets and wearables, it said in a Tuesday announcement. In the tests, the XTouch sensors were folded and opened and closed more than 200,000 times at a 2 mm radius at the fold, with no damage to the sensors themselves “and no degradation to their performance capabilities,” it said. “Flexible displays will also need to have a thin and pliable cover lens that will bend consistently without damage,” and UniPixel's Diamond Guard cover lens technology fits the bill, the company said. UniPixel demonstrated the XTouch sensors and cover lens technology to a major OEM, it said. “While foldable displays are in early consideration by OEMs, our products now meet the early specifications OEMs have targeted to create devices that work effectively with the necessary durability for broad market acceptance."