Many companies have undertaken the challenge of creating flexible displays but the perfect specimen is still some way off. This article looks at the numerous technological challenges involved in making a display flexible, including the thickness of the display relative to its rigidity, and finding a set of technologies that can combine to create a large, stable matrix of individually addressable pixels that will flex. In addition, a number of flexible display technologies under development are described, including liquid crystal displays (LCDs), electrophoretic light-controlling material-based displays, plastic semiconductor backplanes and semiconductors based on organic polymers for plastic electronics, organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays, organic thin film transistor (TFT) technology, an enhanced ink jet-based patterning technique for organic polymer materials, and the development of new emissive materials to go with the flexible backplanes.