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A demo held today at Sony's global headquarters in Tokyo indicates that OLED display technology is even cooler than we thought. A new OLED panel Sony showed makes the company's 3mm thick, XEL-1 11-inch display seem almost like a CRT-era porker.

The panel measures a mere 0.2mm thick-just two-thirds the thickness of the panel seen on Bitstream a couple of weeks ago, which would make this new one ultra-ultra-ultra thin. You almost can't see it from the side. Yet its picture seems to have all the intense color and contrast that makes the XEL-1 so distinctive. The panel achieves QVGA (or 320x240) resolution, which is typical for its size.

The new panel is intended primarily for devices such as portable media players, but Sony execs were reluctant to pigeonhole it; they suggested that the panel's unprecedentedly slim profile might make entirely new applications possible. (Jokingly, we suggested OLED business cards for top-tier execs.) Asked when we might expect to see a full-size display this thin, the president of Sony's Display Device Development Group, Tetsuo Urabe, laughed, shrugged, and finally replied "eventually." -Brent Butterworth