NanoMarkets will host a webminar on OLED lighting, on the morning of Thursday, October 22nd. The event will begin at 10:00 EDT (-05:00 GMT) and will present the firm's latest forecasts and insights into how OLEDs are emerging in the backlighting and general illumination market.

Details on how to register for the event are available on the NanoMarkets' website at www.nanomarkets.net.

Questions answered in this Webinar include:

• How and when will OLEDs succeed in the marketplace?
• What challenges and uncertainties still remain?
• Is there a market for flexible lighting?
• How should OLED lighting be priced?
• How can OLEDs compete with HB-LEDs in backlighting?
• Where are the sweet spots for OLEDs in the general illumination market?
• What are the latest product and design trends.

Nanomarkets' "An Opportunity Analysis for OLED Lighting: 2009 to 2016" report is available now. OLED-Info readers can get a 5% discount, click here for more info on the report and the discount.

Universal Display Corporation say they have been awarded  two new Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I $100,000 programs for OLED lighting from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE):

• In the first project, UDC will demonstrate a very high-efficiency white PHOLED lighting device. Universal Display’s goal is to demonstrate further gains in power efficiency, exceeding its prior research milestone of 102 lumens per watt.
• In the second project, UDC will demonstrate a white PHOLED using the company’s novel OLED permeation barrier technology. The Company, working with Princeton University, recently demonstrated a material system that forms an ultra-hermetic, flexible and transparent environmental barrier for OLEDs. This may provide a cost-effective packaging solution for high-volume, low-cost manufacture of white OLED lighting devices.

iSupply say that OLED TV panel shipments will enjoy a 200-times increase in the next 6 years, but will still account for a tiny portion of the TV market. Global revenue will reach $1.8 billion in 2015, up from $10 million in 2009. Total units will be around 4.7 million.

OLED TV revenue forecast

Strangely, they say that 25,000 units will ship in 2009. But the only OLED TVs cost around 2,500$ (Sony's XEL-1), which means that $10M in revenue equals 4,000 units...

Mitsubishi Electric is showing a new flexible OLED display (they call it the Diamond-Vision OLED) which is a modular display made from small OLED panels. Each panel is one 'pixel', and together they can be made into a large high-res image. There's no limit to the size of this display - it can be used to cover buildings, trains, or even 'entire-cities' like Mitsubishi says...

Mitsubishi 155-inch Diamond-Vision OLED TV

They are now demonstrating a 155" Diamond-Vision OLED TV prototype. Each pixel pitch is 3mm, which means that you have to watch the TV from about 2 meters away. 

Mitsubishi thinks that this screen is better than large LED displays used in sports stadiums and other places, because of the better resolution that can be achieved. The lifetime is said to be 20,000 hours. No word yet on pricing or availability.

Note - the OLEDs themselves are not 'flexible', but the display can be curved because it is made from individual OLED panels...

Mitsubishi entered the OLED market back in 2007.

Alexx Henry's photography studio has made a 'living cover and spread' of the October issue of Outside Magazine. This can only be viewed on-line, but Alexx thinks that some day we'll magazines that can display motion-videos - using technologies such as OLED and E Ink. Here's a short clip that they make, showing the actual cover and spread, and discussing the technology that they use to make these and what they think it can look like in the future:

I'm not sure if OLEDs will ever be used in newspapers - it's more likely that even in the future we'll continue to have e-readers that be loaded with different content. It makes more sense than to use a disposable display...

Sony is showing some new concept designs at CEATEC 2009, including an OLED bracelet walkman and a flexible OLED laptop.

Also on display is a 0.2mm flexible OLED, which seems to be the same one Sony displayed at CES 2009.

UPDATE: We have some new photos from Engadget (who's got a video, too).

Rohm is showing a new wristband with an OLED display. Their idea is that OLEDs can actually be used in jewelry or a watch band. OLEDs are expensive, but so are jewelry pieces so they think that it might be a good usage for the technology. The OLED in the wristband is 0.3mm thick, and run via a small lithium-ion battery.

Rohm is also showing OLED table lights (one inch wide, 4 inches tall). One of their OLED lamp prototypes consumes about 300 milliwatts.

A few weeks ago Intel showed a laptop concept with 3 OLED displays (each about 3" in size). Now we found a video of this nice concept:

The CombOLED project design contest is over, and they present beautiful OLED lighting concepts.

Here are my personal favorites:

OLED clock (with a clear functional link to traditional hourglass):

Underwater OLED lighting:

Interactive OLED game (providing multi-sensorial feedbacks stimulating vision, hearing and touch):

The HYPOLED project (High-Performance OLED-Microdisplays for Mobile Multimedia HMD and Projection Applications) is now in month 18, and they present some intermediate results:

• A new all-digital VGA full-color OLED microdisplay backplane has been designed by Fraunhofer IPMS in a 0.18 micrometer commercial CMOS process and is currently under prototype manufacturing.
• Pico-projector optics (matching HYPOLED VGA microdisplay) has been developed by Fraunhofer IOF and publicly demonstrated.
• The MediaBox connectivity to DVB-T, DVB-H (MPEG-2/4 streaming) and WiFi has been implemented by Fraunhofer IPMS on a low-power multimedia processor platform (Samsung S3C6400) and has been demonstrated.

HYPOLED was originally founded and co-ordinated by MicroEmissive Displays (MED) and the Fraunhofer IPMS. But MED has entered administration, and now they are collaborating with MicroOLED, who joined the team in March 2009. The collaboration targets benchmarking of MicroOLED's existing WVGA and Fraunhofer IPMS' HYPOLED VGA backplane, each in combination with both MicroOLED's and Fraunhofer IPMS' pin OLED stacks.