Here's a really nice video produced by Corning - showing future designs made with durable, transparent and even flexible glass displays. A lot of these displays can be achieved with OLEDs, although it's not specifically mentioned in this video. Still, it's beautifully done:

Update: According to a different report, which makes more sense, Sintek will only supply touch-panels for Samsung AMOLEDs, and will not produce actual AMOLED displays. Sintek will indeed setup a Gen-5.5 plant to produce the touch panels. Update 2 - Digitimes posted a new story correcting their earlier report.

According to Digitimes, Sintek Photronics will supply touch panels for Samsung Mobile Display to be used in AMOLED panels. Digitimes also say that Sintek will setup a new Gen-5.5 LTPS line (scheduled to start production in Q4 2011) to supply backplanes for Samsung. The new plant will produce 50,000 monthly substrates. This will grow to 80,000 later.

According to the article, Samsung will start AMOLED production in their own Gen-5.5 only in Q2 2012. This is strange as we know that Samsung will start production during 2011. In their post, Digitimes also say that LG Display will start production in Q1 2012 (according to our sources, LG already started production). It seems that Digitimes thinks that all AMOLED plants will be delayed by one year (or maybe this is simply a mistake by Digitimes?).

Researchers from the University of Michigan led by Jinsang Kim developed new pure-organic phosphorescence materials made primarily of inexpensive carbon, oxygen, chlorine and bromine and are "easy" to synthesize. This is the first time anyone created an phosphorescence OLED that does not contain any metals. These materials could be used to create cheaper OLEDs (as OLEDs today still need a little bit of expensive metals in them). The new materials exhibit quantum yields of 55%.

The light in those OLEDs comes from oxygen and carbon molecules called "aromatic carbonyls". These materials form strong halogen bonds with halogens in the crystal to pack the molecules tightly. This arrangement suppresses vibration and heat energy losses as the excited electrons fall back to the ground state, leading to strong phosphorescence.

Polymertronics (a UK based company that offers customized experimentation OLED systems) announced their new flexible OLED science kit. These kits provide everything you need to make a working flexible OLED device and experiment with the chemistry, physical structure and the electronic parameters.

Polymertronics are now offering OLED-Info readers a £20 discount (that's about $32US) off their regular price of £290 - for both the flexible and the rigid (glass) spin-coated OLED science kits (and yes, they ship worldwide). To claim the discount simply mention OLED-Info when you place your order. And hurry up, this offer expires on the 15th of March!

SonyEricsson's LiveView is finally shipping in the US - for $82 (it's been available in the UK for quite some time now). The Liveview is an Android accessory with a small (1.3") PMOLED display and can communicate via Android 2.x devices. You can control music, get notifications about phone calls, updates from applications (twitter, facebook) and more. The idea is that you can wear it like a watch.

The LiveView is an interesting device, but it got some dismal reviews from both Engadget and Slashgear who were disappointed - mainly with the buggy software and compatibility issues.

We've got a lot of Super AMOLED Plus news today. Here's a short video comparing the Galaxy S2 (with its 4.3" Super AMOLED Plus display) to a Galaxy S (4" Super AMOLED) and an iPhone 4 (3.5" IPS-LCD). The most apparent thing about the S2 - it's a big phone...

Update: We have some new information about Samsung's AMOLED manufacturing process. It turns out that they plan to soon move to a laser-based method (LITI) from the currently-used shadow-mask method (FMM). This will allows them to achieve 300ppi or more...

Earlier today we posted about the Super AMOLED plus resolution - and now we got our answer. It turns out that my calculations about the pentile matrix were incorrect - it fact it uses 2 sub-pixels for each pixel while a 'real' RGB matrix (or Real-Stripe as Samsung calls it) uses 3 sub-pixels for each pixels - and here's your 50% increase. Here's Samsung's own image showing the difference:

It also turns out that a Real-Stripe matrix also takes up more space per pixel. This explains why a 4.3" display that uses Real-Stripe has the same resolution as a 4" with a penTile matrix. But this display should actually be clearer because of the added sub-pixels and better matrix design.

Update: We now got the answer to this little mystery, you can read it here.

Samsung's new Galaxy S2 phone has a Super AMOLED Plus display but something is strange about the resolution of this phone. It's a 4.3" panel with 800x480 resolution (WVGA). That's the same resolution found on the original Galaxy S that has a 4" Super-AMOLED. When Samsung announced the Super AMOLED Plus they said that it offers 50% more sub-pixels and offers over 300ppi.

The original Super AMOLED used Samsung's PenTile Matrix scheme (shown above on the right) - which uses a shared green pixel (RGBG). The Super AMOLED Plus displays uses a regular RGB matrix (shown above on the left). That means that you need more subpixels to show the same amount of pixels - indeed a pentile matrix uses 33% less pixels (for example a 4X4 RGB display will use 48 subpixels while a 4X4 RGBG pentile will use only 36 subpixels).

A new study (by UC Irvine’s Department of Population Health & Disease Prevention) discovered that LED light bulbs (inorganic-LEDs) contain unsafe levels of carcinogenic toxins. While LEDs do not contain mercury (like in CFL lamps), they do contain lead, arsenic and other unsafe chemicals. This means that it's dangerous to break a LED bulb, and just extrating those toxins from the earth is a destructive process.

The research found that large LEDs contain more toxins than small LEDs - but even low intensity red LED bulbs contains eight times the level of lead allowed under California state law. They state that while LEDs are great in power efficiency - we still need to find a really safe new light source. Perhaps OLEDs will be the answer?

Here's something interesting for you - a new Sci-Fi "Blog Novella" called LiteWorld that is focused on OLEDs and other nano technologies. Basically it tells the story about a black universe into which a flexible "light-paper" (an OLED) is introduced. 

LiteWorld was created by Don Musilli - an entrepreneur that used te a private pilot and a scuba instructor and is influenced by Herbert, Tolkien, and Asimov. Apparantly Don is very excited with OLEDs and wants to spread the word around - in fact he plans to make the story coincide with the actual release of flexible OLEDs.