About one month ago, we announced that General Electric managed to develop roll-to-roll OLEDs and this means that one day we could decorate our room with paper-thin lights with controlled intensity and colors. This technique it’s similar with printing press which means that they are very efficient but the researchers need to make it more cost-effective.

The man who made it all possible is Anil Duggal, Advanced Technology Leader for Organic Electronic at GE Global Research who also promises that soon, these OLEDs will be very cheap that everyone will afford to coat the whole interior with them. Another problem is that for the moment they are not very practical but Duggal said that there won’t be too much waiting.

Here are a few words of Mr. Duggal that already make us hopeful – “We want all offices and homes to have this very flexible light source. When I say flexible, I mean a mechanically flexible light source that you can just paste wherever you want it and turn it on” and we should not forget about the tunable colors as he added that “these things can be made color tunable, so that you can have different swatches of the room lit up in different colors. You can actually even make these things transparent, so you could even imagine putting it on a window”.

Anil Duggal and his team, worked about four years to complete the first roll-to-roll OLEDs, but for now it still needs a lot of work until they manage to perfect it because this technique “it’s at least 10 times cheaper, probably more” than any other OLED manufacturing process.

Duggal’s technology makes the OLEDs very efficient with a bench-mark of 30lm/w that means a doubled efficiency of conventional incandescent bulbs which work at 15 lm/w. The researchers are hoping to achieve an efficiency of 60 lm/w for the roll-to-roll process and that’s before 2010 and if following tests are successful then they will begin commercialization shortly after 2010.

The ultimate goal of Duggal and GE is to develop high-resolution OLED displays which could result in high-rez video or lighting as wallpaper of an entire room. Duggal avoided to assign a deadline for his ultimate fantasy but everything points out that light bulbs will be history in about 10 years.