Polymer Vision, a line of business within Philips Electronics, announced that it has made significant progress in rollable displays for the mobile-device industry. The new 5-inch PV-QML5 rollable display has a decreased radius of curvature, improved operational and mechanical lifetime and paperlike viewing contrast. These are major steps forward compared to the world's first rollable display prototype introduced by Polymer Vision in February 2004. Moreover, current process and yield improvements will enable production within two years.

The Polymer Vision PV-QML5 is an ultra-thin (100µm) featherweight QVGA (320 x 240 pixels) active-matrix display with a diagonal of 5 inches. When not actively used, the display can be rolled up into a small housing with a radius of curvature of less than 7.5 mm. With four gray levels, the monochrome display provides paperlike viewing comfort with a high (10:1) contrast ratio for reading-intensive applications. Even in bright daylight, the display is easy to read. Using a bi-stable electrophoretic display effect from E Ink Corp., the display consumes an exceptionally low amount of power. It is thus ideally suited for mobile applications.

Increasingly, business users are demanding access to broadband information while on the move. Rollable displays are projected to be the primary solution to the consequent demand for larger displays in mobile devices -- without increasing device size, weight, or power consumption. Philips Polymer Vision's rollable display is well positioned to accommodate the user with smooth, paperlike viewing in all sorts of data-centric mobile applications, such as text, agendas, e-mail, electronic maps, and multiple-data information services.

"Rollable displays will revolutionize the level of convenience with which we can access greater volumes and quality of information while on the move," said Karl McGoldrick, CEO of Philips Polymer Vision. " Information content will be a major mobile market driving force, and Polymer Vision's rollable display with 'paperlike' easy reading is strongly positioned to play a key enabling role here."