Well it is an "organic" light-emitting diode display.

Maybe the specs are a little organic, as well.

Anyone who watches TV 8 hours a day should be shot.

This thing would last be 10 years minimum - if I dont sit on it.

That's Bourne on HD-DVD on a Sony OLED TV ? How come not a Blu-Ray screen shot ?

ROFL !!!

at 5 years + the people buying these won't give a shite.

Can it be the case that these screens loose their brightness somehow different then those we are all used to? Some non-linearity or non-non-linearity perhaps?

Considering they will be printing these enmass (like newpaper stock), I doubt anyone will care.

Disposable OLEDs...in your landfill by 2015!

Obviously Sony's definition of OLED lifetime is when it loses 90% of it's brightness, which is how they came to almost double your 17k hour figure :P

Well, this is significant when compared to the other offerings out there. For example, the newest generation of plasma displays from Panasonic have a half-bright rating of 100,000 hours, which equals 41 yrs at 8 hrs a day! Now, most consumers won't need THAT kind of life span, but businesses will - sports bars, hotels, airports, etc.

They'll NEED to really work on that before OLED tech is worth the expense to switch out technologies.

In this day and age, who keeps their electronics that long? We probably replace our TV's every 5-10 years anyway.

Ahh, I don't buy Sony anyway. To tell you the truth I havent bought a sony product save for a PS2 in 8 years. I have only had one product of theirs not fail in a year or less. That was my old Discman. It's still playing hold music at my brother's company.

I replace my tv every 4 years so would not have any affect on me bring on the larger oled displays please thx

The original article I saw says that they measured after 1000 hours of usage, there was a 12% drop in blue luminance, 7 and 8% for red and green.

1000 hours is less than 3 hours a day for a year, which is easy to do.

The big benefits of OLED are 1) power consumption, 2) contrast ratio, and 3) color accuracy.

Sony's 11" screen eats 45 Watts, which is about the same as many 20" LCD's -- which have almost 4x the screen area. So, Sony's XEL-1 gets a big fat F at OLED benefit number one.

If the individual colors are fading at different rates...and at up to 12% per year...then color accuracy is going away pretty fast too; so, Sony gets about a C for benefit number 3, on my arbitrary scale.

And, as the luminance/brightness drops, the effective contrast ratio falls too. Even if the display's black emits no light, it'll still reflect light from other sources, so the contrast ratio is never infinite. Every drop in luminance is a drop in contrast ratio...but the ratio will probably remain higher than other technologies for at least a few years of use...so, I'll say A-.

A-, C, and F. That's not a good report card...especially for an 11" TV that costs as much as a 40"+ TV using other technologies...

@Noobs-R-Us:

In this day and age, who keeps their electronics that long? We probably replace our TV's every 5-10 years anyway.

That's pretty true for most people nowadays I think...but so sad too. I can still remember having black-and-white TV's in 1990 -- that set was probably 30-40 years old, and still got used all the time!

Nowadays, we're buying big huge TV's (or very expensive 11" TV's) and planning for them to need replacement in 5-10 years? That's just nuts in my book!

Comment on Sony's XEL-1 OLED Lasts Half as Long as You Expect, Says Study 1000 hours is barely enough time to determine the TV brightness half-life. DisplaySearch is assuming the decline is linear, as in that it will continue to decline at the same rate until the TV is dead. This is not always true. Projection CRT displays typically lost considerable light in the first 10k hours, but would remain consistent (dim, but consistent) after that. Mikew

They're assuming the rate of decay is linear. It could be better or it could be worse. People will be cranking up the brightness as it fades and that could make things worse.

@alpayerturkmen: or perhaps some kind of non-non-nonlinearity?

It's UP TO 30,000 hours. The TV was probably left in vivid mode and uncalibrated. If you don't calibrate your display when you purchase it, then expect half life on ANY display LCD, plasma, or otherwise.