Essentially, electrons pass through the pickle (or any other active organic matter) and charge the substance. When positive and negative charges collide, they release a photon (light). This pickle represents just one of millions of OLEDs in a potential display. It also means that Vlassic stock will skyrocket if they can only cut those Bread and Butter chips a little bit smaller. [MIT TechTV via PopSci]

Long story short, the display turned on just fine and displayed a—wait for it—fish image.

While a bit quirky, the achievement is noteworthy simply because OLED displays, like some cats, despise water. But this one didn't!

So now flexible OLED displays work under water, or at the very least in tiny cups surrounding by Playmobil people. [Plugged In via OLED Display]

Suspended in a flexible matrix of carbon nanotubes and rubber, the new OLED displays can be stretched an additional 50% of their normal size and wrapped around complex, 3D surfaces. No, they aren't paper-thin like other prototypes we've seen and the graphics are currently monochrome, but these OLEDs appear to be incredibly practical for everyday use. Plus, the displays can be manufactured through an industrial printing process that should make the technology inexpensive to boot...you know...some day...or never...or tomorrow...or something. Neither children's toys nor condoms will ever be the same. [Technology Review via KurzweilAI]

Ars interviewed Barry Young, Managing Director of the OLED Association, and managed to get a pretty good read on where the OLED industry is, and more importantly, where it's headed. The nebulous long term projections about OLED dominance still stand, but the short term prospects are, in a word, shitty. Here's why:

Some major manufacturers have gotten to be pretty good at building the small OLED TVs we're used to seeing. Samsung is about to introduce a 14.1-inch pipsqueak to go against Sony's 11-inch wonder midget, and prices for these mini-sets should start dropping soon enough. Unfortunately, these small OLED screens are the largest functional television displays anyone is capable of mass-producing right now.

Sparing you the mind-numbing technical details (those here), manufacturers are being faced with two equally unattractive (read: expensive) options for building TV-sized OLED TVs, like the one Samsung showed off last year: either devise an entirely new manufacturing process, which would require the invention of new techniques and machines for fabrication, or pursue a different type of OLED panel. Both options would circumvent the current size restrictions, but both options are extremely expensive.

In the current climate, companies like Samsung can't be certain that such risky investments will pay off fast enough, and for the time being, investment capital is scarce. Answering a question about Samsung's plan for a 32" OLED set, Young could only say this: "How soon Samsung will do their next generation will be affected by the downturn." In other words, sorry 2009. And 2010. [Ars via OLED-Display]

Samsung couldn't accomplish this with a normal glass substrate for obvious reasons, so they pioneered a new "sputtering" technique to coat the panel with a flexible membrane. Here's how it goes: a block of the coating material is blasted with an ion gun, causing it to eject bits of itself into an thermodynamically unbalanced cloud of atoms, which then cling to and form a film on anything else in the vacuum chamber — namely, this floppety panel.

This looks like it is just a one-off, unpriced expo unit, but at least we know it's possible. This tech come interesting close in capability to Samsung's other recently demonstrated ultra-thin color display, so we might have the beginning of an confusing display tech overlap. Cool, Samsung. Please sort that out, and wake me up when my shirt is a TV. [TechOn via OLED Display]

And in a few years, you might not need to sling a set of extra batteries with you—Westfall says that fuel cells with "maybe twice the capacity as lithium-ion batteries" are on the horizon, which, combined with OLED displays (which are also brighter, clearer and all-around sexier) translate into a shitpot more snaps before your battery begs for more smack.

Even if the switch to fuel cells takes a stretch to actually happen, the OLED transition won't—Canon has been dumping a lot of cash into the tech, giving them "the infrastructure needed to bring this online." It won't just be in the super high-end stuff either, they're planning to "implement OLED in all our consumer products: digital still cameras, camcorders, and inkjet printers."

Yeah, the megapixel race might be over, but this is just getting good. [Crave]