Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 7 March 2003, 3:37 PM
Tuesday
Tuesday 4/3/2003
"Life in plastic, it's fantastic." So sang Aqua, in their zeitgeist-defining opus "Barbie Girl", which helped bring the 20th century to a fitting close. But could even those savants foresee how appropriate their bien pensées would be to the dawn of the 21st? Today sees the launch of the first mass-market full-feature plastic (or organic, as we must call them for marketing reasons) LED display. It's part of a rather nice camera Kodak has announced, the EasyShare LS633, which would be a tempting proposition even without its ultra-high-tech eyepleasing screen. Does it really look good? Does it deliver on the better battery life, wider colour spectrum and greater angle of view promised by the technology? We'll have to wait and see.
We'll have to wait a bit longer to see whether another aspect of OLEDs comes to pass -- their notoriously short lifetime. While the manufacturing benefits of OLEDs are significant -- as they're made from a plastic compound, not a semiconductor or a complex layering of precision layering, they're much easier to work with -- they're also very prone to degradation over time and contamination from the outside. That's what took so long to sort out in the decade or so during which the technology's been developed. Either Kodak has fixed this, or the life span of any digital camera is now so short that it doesn't matter. I doubt many people are using digital cameras from more than two years ago: the cost has come down so much and the features got so much better, the temptation to upgrade frequently is huge. Where's the point in designing a 20-year lifespan into a device that'll be landfill in three? We're already seeing that in laptop batteries, where the cost of replacing the specialist Li-ion cells after their two-year life is over is often enough to make it worth upgrading the whole device... how convenient.
And so the celebration of disposable pop that Aqua brought forth may yet be an apposite paean to the age of disposable high technology portended by the LS633. Death in plastic, how fantastic.
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