Lumiotec announced today that they will begin mass production of OLED Lighting panels in January 2011. The production capacity will be around 60,000 panels a year, and the company will offer panels in five different shapes (two squares and three rectangular) and in two different colors: lamp (3000K) and natural white (5000K). Selling 60,000 panels a year means that most of these will go into commercial lamps, and not just 'sample designs'.

Lumiotec has started shipping sample panels back in February 2010 (here's our hands-on review) - and the new panels will be thinner, lighter and cheaper. In fact thickness and weight have been halved (all the panels are 2.1mm thick), and the price for the large square panel (145x145mm) will be 30,000 yen (around $360) - less than half of the price of the sample panel.

AU Optronics is showing a 14" 3D (active-shutter) AMOLED TV with a full-HD (1920x1080) resolution in 3D or 2D mode. Back in October 2009, AUO showed 14" AMOLED prototypes, it's not clear whether the same display with 3D support, or is that an altogether new panel.

AUO is also showing OLED lighting panels. AUO's panel offer 50 lumens/watt efficiency and comes with an embedded high-efficiency green power drive. Last month we reported that AUO might be developing OLED Lighting panels, so it's good to see that this is true. Back in 2006, AUO was using Universal Display's PHOLED materials for AMOLED displays, but we do not know whether they are using them now for the lighting panels.

China's Irico group announced that their 4.5-Gen AMOLED production line is ready. The plant is located at the OLED industrial base in Guangdong province. Irico are now entering the second phase of their project - they want to build two 4.5-Gen AMOLED lines - with a 9.5 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) investment. They have already begun working on the first line, with the second one planned for October 2011.

Irico has begun construction back in March 2009 (investment was $75 million). At least back then, the plan was to produce 2.2" displays.

Samsung plans to build a Gen-8 pilot production line for OLED TVs, according to recent reports from Korea. They want to produce 55" OLED panels, and the pilot line will be able to produce 4,000 such panels monthly. Samsung will use the same building as used in their upcoming 5.5-Gen production plant.

In September, Yoon Boo-keun, the head of Samsung's TV business unit said that "It's
too premature to commercialize OLED TVs due to strong price resistance, while Brian Berkeley, Samsung's OLED R&D VP said that OLED
TVs are "coming soon". We'll have to wait and see what Samsung plans for us...

Update: The E7 has been delayed till 'early 2011'

Nokia has announced today (on Twitter) that the E7 will start shipping next month (December 10th). The E7 is a QWERTY slider running Symbian^3 and has a 4" Clear-Black AMOLED (640x360) display. Other specs include a 8mp camera (720p video), 16MB flash memory, W-Fi and GPS.

Microsoft WP7 phones starts shipping, including the Samsung Focus and Dell Venue Pro, both of which use AMOLED displays. The Venue Pro is a portrait slider with a 4.1" AMOLED display, and is now available in some Microsoft stores (and will be available on-line from Dell's site next week).

Dell Venue Pro

The Focus Focus has a 4" Super-AMOLED and is now shipping for AT&T's network.

A few weeks ago the new Samsung Continuum was leaked - a Galaxy S variant but has two displays: a main 3.4" Super-AMOLED display and a secondary "ticker"
display which is also an OLED (1.8", 96x480). This phone is now official, but it turns out that this is actually just one display (4") that is 'marketed' as two displays. The lower 'screen' is used for notification (Samsung calls this a 'ticker' display). Here's an official Samsung ad:

We just got word from OSRAM that the PirOLED lamp costs €9,800, and will start shipping on November 15th. You can already order it today. The lamp uses both LED and OLED lighting: 5 ORBEOS OLED panels and 5 LED lamps.

Samsung is introducing a new OLED driver IC that includes image optimization. OLED Max I provides color space conversion, sharpness emphasis, low gradation emphasis, favorite color conversion and block noise improvement technology. The IC size is 6(h)x6(w)x0.6(t) mm. It supports image resolution up to 800x1024, and includes RGB, 3/4-Wire SPI and I2C interfaces.

Samsung is already working on the next-gen driver (OLED Max II) which will include all of the Max I algorithms and also add Block Noise Reduction, Bit Truncation Noise Reduction and Automatic Current limit. The size, resolution and interfaces information haven't been released yet.

Update: the PirOLED will ship on November 15th, and will cost €9,800.

OSRAM is introducing a new OLED lamp, the PirOLED. It actually uses both LED and OLED lighting: 5 ORBEOS OLED panels and 5 LED lamps (OSRAM OSLON LCW CP7P). Light intensity is up to 300 Lux.

The PirOLED is already shipping, but we do not know the price.