Majestyk wrote:My guess is in a couple of years OLED will be the standard on almost all digital watches, and LCD will finally start to trickle out; much like what happened in the 70's with LCD vs LED....Jeff
Jeff, I hate to be a kill-joy here, but I don't share your optimism.
The average watch user does not want to press a button to read time, and he also does not want to exchange or recharge batteries every week.
These are exactly the reasons why LEDs were displaced by LCDs.
OLEDs do look really nice, but they consume a lot of power. Efficiency is (still) less than for normal LEDs. I'd really like to know what kind of battery the Fossil OLED watch has.
Anything that emits light (=energy) needs an energy source. We won't see constantly-on LED (or any other light emitting technology) watches unless someone finds a battery with 20 times higher energy density than a Lithium cell (BTW: a CR2032 has 2160J/cm³. TNT has 7600J/cm³)
Why?
The red Majestyk watch as a modern example with decent LED efficiency consumes 30mA with an average number of LED segments on.
The best LEDs today have about 50% efficiency (i.e. 50% of the electrical power is emitted in form of light), but let's assume the Majestyk has only 10% (worse than a filament lamp).
So if we had LEDs with 100% efficiency (ten times more), only a tenth of the power would be needed to achieve the same brightness, i.e. 3mA instead of 30mA.
A CR2032 batttery has about 220mAh capacity -> empty after 220mhA / 3mA = 73hrs (3 days).
Conclusion: a constantly-on selft-lighting watch display is physically impossible (I'm sure someone would have said the same about aeroplanes or travelling to the moon 150 years ago :wink: )