Canon said it aims to take a majority stake in Tokki, a supplier of flat panel-making equipment, for $69 million or more to speed development of OLED panels.

Canon has been developing OLED panels in a bid to replace liquid crystal display (LCD) panels, which it now procures from outside suppliers for digital camera, camcorder and printer displays. Canon said it may offer small-sized flat TVs using OLED displays in the future, and will use SED for large-sized TVs.

VW shows a cool design for a future electric car. The car is 'covered' by a transparent OLED screen (on glass) that can show information for the driver and passengers.

Don't expect this anytime soon...

OSD Displays has successfully brought to market a 2.4-inch QVGA Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode (AMOLED) for mobile devices. With a maximum module thickness of only 1.85 mm OSDs new line of AMOLED modules are ideal for mobile devices. Products such as mobile phones, digital cameras and media players are rapidly becoming thinner as manufacturers strive to improve portability and offer consumers more stylish designs.

AMOLED designs have many advantages over first generation passive matrix OLED designs, such as longer lifetime, higher brightness and increased resolution. OSDs new 2.4 diagonal portrait mode QVGA AMOLED delivers high image quality thanks to a high luminance of 200 cd/m2, high contrast ratio of 10000:1, wide viewing angle of 170 , degrees minimum in all directions, and fast response speed of 50us maximum.

Samsung Electronics announced today that it is mass producing a 16M-color display driver IC (DDI) for AMOLED displays used in mobile phones and other handheld devices. With outstanding image quality, AMOLEDs are attracting attention from device designers as the next generation display technology of choice.

Samsung's new mobile DDI for AMOLED displays support qVGA resolutions (240x320) and is capable of producing a range of over sixteen million colors. It is well in step with the recent expansion of multimedia functions and services offered in mobile devices. Samsung's new 16M-color DDI self-adjusts the screen brightness, illuminating only those areas that need light. As a result, power consumption is minimized and battery life extended. The read-only memory (ROM) is built in separately, enabling red, blue and green (RBG) gamma compensation to reproduce more lifelike images.

The new 16M-color AMOLED DDI is currently in mass production and has been introduced in Samsung SDI's AMOLED panels. Samsung's broad line up of DDIs for LCDs, PDPs and AMOLED displays addresses the diverse needs of its customer base.

For the third quarter of 2007, the Company reported a net loss of $2,960,565 or $(0.08) per diluted share, versus a net loss of $2,943,287 or $(0.09) per diluted share for the third quarter of 2006. The Company’s net loss for the nine-month period ended September 30, 2007 was $12,719,737 or ($0.38) per diluted share, compared to a net loss of $10,777,978, or ($0.35) per diluted share, for the same period in 2006.

Universal Display is in a solid financial position as our revenue mix reflects momentum in the commercialization of our PHOLED technology, said Sidney D. Rosenblatt, Chief Financial Officer of Universal Display. While revenues and net loss were about the same for the third quarters of 2006 and 2007, sequentially, we saw a significant increase in our commercial chemical revenue for the third quarter of 2007 compared to the second quarter. Revenue increased from $2,315,170 in the second quarter to $3,077,281 in the third quarter, and our net loss was reduced from $5,175,371 in the second quarter to $2,960,565 in the third quarter, as our PHOLED technology and materials continue to be incorporated into more commercial products. The OLED industry is closer than ever to realizing broad commercialization of OLED technology in personal electronics, TV’s and other display applications.

Sony said that if their 11" XEL-1 OLED TV will fare well in Japan after the launch in December, they might start to sell it in the US as well, in time for the holidays. It will also depend on the availability of the OLED panels. Pricing might be lower than in Japan.

Sony also said that they do not expect larger OLED TVs until 2009.

NanoMarkets has published a new white paper that discusses the market opportunities for OLED lighting. The paper was drawn from a report released in Q3 of 2007. NanoMarkets discusses the status of current OLED lighting research, the competition, and also "Open Questions, Challenges and Solutions".

This analysis makes the case for printed and organic lighting market/OLED lighting seem very easy to make. But as always the devil is in the details. OLED lighting may be able to offer remarkable things such as substrate flexibility, but no one yet knows where that capability can generate the most revenues. Among the many new products that could be created using cool new OLED lighting technology we don’t know yet which are likely to be snapped up by customers. And while the potential for using R2R processes and printing opens up exciting possibilities for price points that would greatly accelerate the adoption of OLED lighting, nobody has yet settled on which manufacturing processes or materials make the most sense and which can promote the greatest leaps forward in terms of brightness, power efficiency, stability and lifetime.

The state of the art for OLED lamps today is roughly in the 1030 lm/W range today, but that’s likely to be a short-term frontier. UDC, for example, is in the midst of a 40 lm/W project and Eastman Kodak is working on broad enhancements to small molecule OLEDs under a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) program culminating in September, 2008, with hopes of hitting 50 lm/W. Another DOE project is applying a novel nanocomposite coating material to the OLED anode to optimize hole transport and attain 60-80 lm/W in conjunction with a life exceeding 10 Khrs. The DOE’s technology roadmap 100 to 150 lumens/W for OLED lighting in the long run.