We have made progress in our research on large sheet-type displays and continued with our development of various displays that can handle full-featured 8K video.

■Sheet-type display technologies

  We are developing a lightweight, and thin sheet-type organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display for the easy viewing of immersive 8K video at home. In FY 2018, we developed an 88-inch 8K sheet-type display that uses a sheet glass substrate only several millimeters thick and exhibited it at various domestic and international events such as the NHK STRL Open House 2018 and the IBC 2018 (Figure 2-6). This display was demonstrated in cooperation with LG Display and ASTRODESIGN, Inc.

■Full-featured 8K liquid crystal display

  We are developing a full-featured 8K liquid crystal display that can be mounted on an outside broadcast (OB) van. In FY 2018, we developed a 31.5-inch display that supports HDR, a wide color gamut and a 120-Hz frame frequency (Figure 2-7) in cooperation with Sharp Corporation. The display uses the U-SDI interface and employs the local dimming technology, which individually controls the amount of light of the LED backlight for each area of the screen to increase the contrast. By increasing the number of dividing areas for local dimming, the display achieved higher HDR image quality than with conventional displays.

■Full-featured 8K projector

  For the large-screen viewing of full-featured 8K video, we are developing an 8K projector that adopts red, green and blue laser diodes as light sources to achieve a wide color gamut and supports HDR, and a 120-Hz frame frequency (Figure 2-8). In FY 2018, we reduced the speckle noise caused by coherency of laser light sources (i.e., local brightness variations on a screen due to the interference of laser light) to improve the image quality. A speckle noise pattern depends on the polarization direction. We therefore used an optical system that can temporally change the polarization direction of the output light of the projector to change the noise pattern. This reduced the perceived speckle noise to about 70% that of a conventional projector.