February 2009

Panasonic is working on OLED lighting panels, using printing methods. They prototypes a high efficiency panel at Printable Electronics 2009.

The OLED lighting panel features a luminance efficiency of 40lm/W and a CRI (color rendering index) value of 95. The external quantum efficiency is 36.1%, and the half-life of the luminance exceeds 20,000 hours when the initial luminance is 1,000cd/m^2.

Read more at TechOn

Update: The picture frame costed 795$ over at Amazon.com, but they are now out of stock.

The price of the Kodak 7.6" OLED photo frame keeps falling... it started out at 999$ (back in December 2008), then at January it was 856$, and then you could get it for 776$ at TheNerds. They even offered 9$ by using the FEB09 coupon (till end of February, just follow the previous link and claim your coupon). The price is lower now at Amazon.com as well - 795$.

Kodak wireless OLED picture frame

Why is the price falling so faster? It might be that Kodak is finding it very difficult to actually sell those frames at such a high price. Or perhaps CMEL are pricing the 7.6" OLED panels lower now.

Samsung re-iterates its commitments to OLEDs, saying it will double production in 2009, and double it again in 2010. Today Samsung are making 2m panels a year.

Samsung says that OLED TVs, monitors or laptop displays will be possible in 2009, and they think that by 2010 they'll be able to commercialize flexible OLEDs.

I don't know about the flexible ones, but if Samsung are planning to actually release their 14.1" AMOLED panels for laptops in 2009, it's great news.

The Sony X walkman is now available to pre-order at amazon.co.uk, for 216 GBP - the 16GB version. The 32GB version will cost 283GBP.

Sony NWZ X1000 Walkman

Eiji Shiko from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, developed an OLED device that emits circularly polarized light in the visible light range. This could enable 3D displays on OLEDs.

To produce the circularly polarized light in the visible light range, the spin state during the light emission process is controlled by injecting a spin-polarized carrier from the ferromagnetic negative electrode into the emission layer.

Toshiba exhibited a new technology that is designed to form patterns called "nano-grating,"
which have a pitch of several hundred nanometers, on a SiO₂ substrate,
improving the light extraction efficiency by 1.6 times compared with a case where no measures are taken.

Toshiba created the diffraction grating on a 4-inch SiO₂
wafer and used it for a 2mm-square monochrome OLED device. As a result,
the total flux was increased by 60% compared to when no grating is
used. As far as the emission peak wavelength is concerned, the light
emission intensity was virtually doubled, according to the company. 

Read more at TechOn

Samsung has officially announced the TL320 digital camera we spotted at Amazon a couple of days ago. It has a 3" AMOLED display, Half-VGA with 460K pixels. This is the largest OLED display on a camera yet.

It seems like Samsung are heavily into those small OLED displays - we've seen several phones and this camera all announced within a week. It'll be interesting to see if other companies will hurry to put the displays in their own gadgets too.

DisplaySearch thinks that AMOLEDs will continue to grow quickly. AMOLEDs revenue increased 110% in 2008, and they project that total OLED display revenue will exceed $6 billion in 2015 (up from $591 million in 2008).

OLED displays accounted for less than 1% of total flat panel display revenue in 2008. DisplaySearch forecasts it will reach 5% in 2015.

It seems that Samsung is about to release a new 12MP digital camera with a large (3") OLED display - the T320.

Samsung T320 digital camera

The TL320 has 5x Schneider Wide Angle Dual Image Stabilized Zoom. We found the camera over at Amazon.com, it lists for 330$, but not yet available. No official news from Samsung yet...

UPDATE: Amazon removed the link now - guess it was too early a leak...

UPDATE II: Samsung officially released the TL320, and Amazon put it back on.

I'm happy to say that we're launching our new OLED-Reports section. Our aim is to have the most complete collection of OLED market reports, research papers and data sheets.

We currently offer reports from Nanomarkets, DisplaysSearch and ResearchAndMarkets. We are also working on agreements with more vendors to include their reports as well. For the DisplaySeach reports, we offer 5% discount on all reports and periodicals for our readers, just make sure you follow our links to DisplaySearch. Hopefully we will offer more discounts for the new vendors as well.