4D Systems (one of OLED-Info's sponsors) announced a new graphics chip, the Picaso-GFX2. The chip is designed to work with all popular OLED and LCD panels in the market. 4DS says the new chip sports powerful graphic, text, image, animation and sound generation capabilities. It can be used stand-alone as an embedded graphics processor or as a co-processor to host a micro-controller through its hardware serial interface. 4D says it's plug and play and will work with most 16-bit 80 series color LCD and OLED displays.

The Fraunhofer-IPMS has released some new brochures about their various OLED projects. Check out these brochure (attached below this post) for technical details about the various OLED panels, future application ideas and more.

The first project is the HYPOLED project (High-Performance OLED-Microdisplays for Mobile Multimedia HMD and Projection Applications) - working towards VGA color OLED microdisplays for HMD (Head-Mounted-Displays) and pico-projectors. The HYPOLED project also developed a "MediaBox" for HMDs.

Germany's Sterrix Technologies has filed a family of patents for a new OLED based 3D auto stereoscopic (no glasses) display. The resolution of this display will be 100 times higher than HD images, which can be used to create more than 100 perspective at the same time - allowing for smooth 3D images from any viewing angle and any distance. The display has over 1000 cores (inline processors), needed to create those perspectives.

This display uses a new pixel structure which on one hand consists of colored pixels, and on the other hand consists of pixels, which are adapted to the anatomy of the human eye by presenting additional image information. Through those pixels it’s easier for the human brain to internally generate the spatial image, which makes it more relaxing viewing 3D images and videos on the display.

Samsung has sold over 200,000 Galaxy S phones in South Korea - in just 10 days. That's a very good number for the Korean market. The Galaxy S Android phone has a 4" 800x480 Super-AMOLED display, 1Ghz Processor and can shoot HD videos (720p). You
can buy the Galaxy S unlocked in the US for $599.

Samsung Galaxy S

Blackbody is introducing a new OLED lamp, called MGR. It uses 48 white and 24 red OLEDs. The overall active OLED area is 6.480cm², and the lamp fills a volume of 2.90m x 0.85m x 0.70m. It is actually a chandelier, hung from the ceiling:

The MGR was designed by Bruno Lefebvre. Here's how he describes his design: MGR is an OLED banner, an expression of Blackbody. This new language of light, gives us building blocks to conceive simple or complex, white and colored light compositions. The arrangement in the three axes XYZ of one single module reminds of the L40 iconic masterpiece from the 1920’s, designed by Gerrit Rietveld, functional and cultural origins of the MGR. We have named our creation MGR (Merci Gerrit Rietveld) to thank our fathers, like Gilles Derain and other famous lamp designers did in the past.

A few days ago we reported that the Samsung S8500-Wave phone is finally shipping in the US - and it costs $499 unlocked. The phone is now selling for only $399 - that's a nice $100 discount in a few days.... The wave is Samsung's first Bada phone, and the first one to have a super AMOLED display (3.3" 800x480). Other features include Bluetooth 3.0, Wi-Fi, a 1Ghz processor, 5Mp camera, a-GPS, accelerometer, 2GB/8GB of internal memory, micro-SD slot DivX/XViD support and 720p recording/encoding.

Samsung Wave s8500

Buy the S8500 Wave now, unlocked for $399.

TVLogic's TDM-150W is a professional 3D
Stereoscopic monitor that has a 15" 1366x768 AMOLED panel (this is the LG Display panel as used in the EL9500 OLED TV). The monitor requires active-shutter glasses for 3D images. TVLogic is showing this monitor at the KOBA show 2010:

UBi Sanup Research has posted their new OLED quarterly report for 1Q 2010. They say that AMOLED sales reached $183 million - a 11% drop compared to last quarter. Total OLED sales (PMOLED+AMOLED) reached $237 million - a decrease of %14 from last quarter. AMOLED account to 77% of total OLED sales. OLED shipments were 9.1 million units from Korea, 7.4m units Taiwan and 5.8m from Japan.

UBi says that OLED shipments is expected to grow due to increased PMOLED and AMOLED supply.

Update: According to Novaled, this report is not true. They are set to remain in the IP & Material business, in both OLED displays and lighting.

According to OLEDNet, Novaled is set to become a manufacturer of OLED Lighting panels (instead of being a supplier of OLED materials and technology/IP). They are moving away from displays because they lost the "competitive edge" to Korean companies.

Novaled is focusing on flexible OLEDs based on stainless steel substrate. They will introduce a 150x150mm, 25lm/W, 10,000 hours white-OLED panel in 2010. In 2011 they will add a 200x200mm, 40lm/W, 25,000 hours panel. In 2012 they will improve this to 50lm/W, 50,000 hours. By 2012, their OLEDs will be flexible, too (using roll-to-roll manufacturing process).

A google employee (Jeff Sharkey) has posted an interesting post - testing how using different color filters in Android (on the Google Nexus One) to test the OLED's battery life. He use SurfaceFlinger (Android's low-level window composer) and created several options: from red-only to full-color.

Using just red halves the power consumption, and using red+green results in 25% better consumption. Jeff shares his patch online , so you can download and see for yourself. The phone remains usable, so this is an interesting way to save power... Jeff also posted a short video showing how the phone behaves using the different filters: