Researchers from Samsung Electronics developed the world's first Quantum-Dots emissive full-color display (called QLED). Samsung produced a 4" 320x240 Active-Matrix QD-Emissive display made on both glass and flexible plastic.

QLED display promise to be more efficient than LCDs and OLEDs, and be cheaper to make (Samsung estimates that they will cost less than half of what it costs to make LCDs or OLED panels) - but as of today, QLEDs are less efficient than OLEDs, and also offer about 10,000 lifetime hours at best. It is estimated that it will take at least 3 years to commercialize QLEDs - and obviously by then OLEDs will improve a lot, too.

Winstar is showing new graphic monochrome (yellow) PMOLED displays for automobiles. We do not have a lot of information yet (we're not sure if these are in production at all) besides this photo:

The company has also released 3 new monochrome yellow 128x64 PMOLED modules. Two modules are 2.4" in size (but one is with a bezel, and the other is without). The third module is 2.7" in size. All three modules have built-in SSD1305 driver IC and offer parallel (6800 or 8080), Serial SPI and I2C interfaces.

Samsung developed a new 5.2" glasses-free 3D AMOLED panel for mobile applications. Samsung uses a six-subpixel structured white OLED with color filters. The 3D is achieved using fixed parallax barriers and the AMOLED panel features only about 5% crosstalk and is only 1mm thick.

Samsung will present this new panel at SID 2011 (May 15-21). There will be a lot of other OLED presentations and new devices shown at SID.

It seems that some Nokia N8 and C7 AMOLED displays are defective. The most common complaint (there are several actually) is that the screen has a purple tint in darker areas. It's not clear yet whether this is a software or a hardware issue. It is speculated that Nokia uses two kinds of displays - although it's unlikely as all AMOLEDs are made by Samsung.

In the photo above you can see the problem (on the phone on the left - the clock and button shouldn't be red!). Nokia hasn't officially recognized this issue, but it seems that more and more users complain.

C3Nano announced a $3.2 million venture-capital round-A financing. C3Nano is an early stage startup (a spin-out from Professor Zhenan Bao's chemical engineering lab at Stanford University) developing a new proprietary hybrid carbon nanotube (CNT) based transparent electrode ink and film.

C3Nano's new material can be used as a low-cost alternative for ITO in flexible OLEDs, solar cells and other applications. The company claims that their material is solution-coated and printable and is more durable, flexible and transparent than ITO.

Samsung released a short video showing the difference between an IPS-LCD (as used in Apple's iPhone 4), a Super AMOLED and the new Super AMOLED Plus:

Super AMOLED Plus displays are an upgrade to Super AMOLED. They use a real-stripe subpixel matrix and not pentile - and so has 50% more sub-pixels. The PPI is a bit larger but Samsung will soon make them at much higher resolutions. Super AMOLED Plus displays are also thinner, brighter and use 18% less energy than the older Super AMOLED displays.

Kaneka announced that it will start accepting orders for OLED lighting panels on March 22nd, 2011 in Japan (and later in April in Europe). Kaneka will offer OLED square panels in five colors (warm white, red, orange, blue and green). The panels will be dimmable (in the range from 1,000cd/m² to 5,000cd/m²).

Kaneka's OLED panels will cost around ¥2 million (approx $24,000) per square meter - and the company believes that the price will drop to ¥200,000 ($2,400) next year and to ¥50,000 ($600) or less by 2020. Production capacity in 2011 will be 10,000m² - and this will grow to 100,000m² in 2015. Kaneka panels will not be very efficient - around 20lm/W and will offer around 10,000 hours lifetime. But the company plans to improve this to about 60lm/W and 25,000 by 2014.

We've got new details about the resolution of Samsung's Super AMOLED Plus. Super AMOLED Plus drops the PenTile matrix used in Samsung's previous generation AMOLEDs, and so have 50% sub pixels (see explanation here). This causes it to be clearer, but actually each pixel is a bit larger and so a 4.3" Super AMOLED Plus display features the same resolution as a 4" Super AMOLED.

But we were also told that Samsung will produce Super AMOLED Plus at higher resolutions - and achieve over 300ppi. Today we learned that Samsung plans to move from Fine-Metal-Mask (FMM) technology to laser-induced thermal imaging (LITI). This will enable them to achieve much higher resolutions. We do not know when they plan to actually start using LITI, but when they do they'll be able to produce displays with much higher resolutions (on par with Apple's Retina-Display).

Update: We found a nice video showing the new monitors, see below

Back in January we reported that Sony plans to release new professional OLED monitors - and they finally did so today. The Trimaster EL series offers two sizes - 17" (BVM-E170) and 25" (BVM-E250).  The monitors offer hyper-accurate color reproduction and 'perfect' image quality without motion blur due to the OLED's fast response time. The display support HDMI, DisplayPort, 3G-SDI, SD-SDI and HD-SDI. The monitors are thin - 148mm in depth.

These monitors aren't cheap: the BVM-E250 will be released in Japan in May 2011 for 2.5 million yen ($30,000) and the BVM-E170 will be released in July for 1.3 million yen ($15,000). It's only about 10% more than Sony's equivalent LCD monitors. Here's a nice video showing the two new monitors also discussing the state of the OLED industry:

University of Rochester Professor of Chemical Engineering Ching Tang has been awarded the Wolf Prize in the field of chemistry. Profession Tang invented OLEDs during his work in Kodak back in the 1970s. Tang is widely recognized as one of the leaders in the organic electronic industry and in photovoltaics.

The Wolf Prize is given annually by the Israeli Wolf Foundation and is considered second in prestige to the Nobel Prize. In the 33 years that the Wolf Prize has been awarded, one out of every three scientists to win it in physics, chemistry, and medicine has gone on to win the Nobel Prize. Tang shares the 2011 prize with Professor Stuart Alan Rice of the University of Chicago, and Professor Krzystof Matyjaszewski of Carnegie Mellon University.