The Holst centre released videos showing how durable flexible OLEDs are - they can be hit by a hammer or even be cut in half and still continue to work:

The OLED being cut video is actually rather old, it was released in 2009, but they just uploaded it to YouTube again and it's nice to see. The hammer video seems to be new, although we've seen these kinds of videos before - from UDC in 2007 and Samsung in 2009.

nTact has joined the Holst Centre partner network. The two companies will jointly develop technologies to enable patterned deposition of homogeneous film layers on flexible foils. nTact's Selective Area Coating technology will hopefully be fast enough to be used in a roll-to-roll process using low-viscosity inks.

The Holst center says that this research program will be a necessary step towards large-volume manufacturing of OPV and OLED lighting devices on flexible substrates.

Samsung's Galaxy S II is just starting to appear in the US, and it's already time to start speculating on its successor - the S III. According to an anonymous user in a message board, the S III will have 2 Ghz quad-core processor, the latest Ice Cream Sandwich OS, a 10mp camera, NFC and 1080p 60 fps video. But we're mostly interested in the display - a 4.65" Super AMOLED HD display offering a strange 1280x1024 resolution (352 ppi?).

These specs seems very optimistic, especially the display. The first Super AMOLED HD device, the Galaxy Note phone has a 1280x800 resolution on a 5.3" display (using PenTile technology). This means that Samsung will need to improve the ppi quite a bit. And the 1280x1024 resolution doesn't really make sense, does it?

Korea Investment & Securities produced an interesting investment report about the Korean and Taiwanese AMOLED industry. They focus on material and equipment suppliers. Basically they say that large OLED panels will be produced soon (by 2013 or 2014 at the latest) by both Samsung and LG, and they try to identify which companies will benefit from this OLED market expansion. They say that both LG and Samsung will eventually convert their lines to Oxide-TFTs.

Strangely they do not even mention Universal Display and Novaled - which are both major material suppliers to Samsung and LG - even though they do list a lot of "foreign" material suppliers such as Dow Chemical, Idemitsu Kosan, Merck and even Kodak (which is no longer into OLEDs...). In their analysis for Duksan, for example, they do not mention the fact that the green material is now supplied by Universal - which should reduce the company's revenue from OLEDs... So we do not vouch for this report...

There's an interesting report that both Samsung and LG have recently produced prototype 55" OLED TV panels. These panels will be unveiled in the FPD International 2011 exhibition in Japan next month.

According to the report, Samsung has produced the 55" panel in their 5.5-Gen line using Small Mask Scanning technology (SMS, which replaces Fine Metal Mask, or FMM). As was previously reported, LG is using white OLED with color filters to produce their large panels. Both companies are satisfied with the panels' quality, power consumption and lifetime.

Kia unveiled a new concept car called the GT, which uses transparent OLEDs to display instrument data and navigation. They are using three OLED panels to create a 3D effect, this is quite clever:

Kia is also using OLEDs in the climate control display, to the right of the driver. This car incorporates some pretty smart ideas!

Germany's Fraunhofer institute has been touting their bi-directional OLED microdisplays for quite some time, and now they are showing a new version that doubles as a dimensional sensor. To create a bi-directional display, Fraunhofer placed photodiodes between the OLED pixels. These microdisplays can be used as dimensional sensorics for surface characterization (distance or inclination sensors).

"By inverse-confocal imaging approach a point-source sensor with purely electronic scanning allows extremely compact sensor modules", explains Constanze Grossmann from Fraunhofer IOF. "This opens completely new opportunities for machine integration."

Samsung's Epic 4G Touch (Galaxy S2 variant) is now shipping for Sprint - for $199. The Epic 4G Touch offers a a 4.5" WVGA Super AMOLED plus display, 1.2Ghz dual-core processor, Bluetooth 3 and HSPA+. It's only 8.49mm thick at its thinnest point.

There are reports that Seiko Epson and Tokyo Electron are planning to launch an OLED TV production project, in a ¥2-3 billion ($20-40 million) investment. The companies are still considering several options for this plant, but apparently they want to begin installing equipment sometime in 2013, with "full scale mass production" in 2013. This seems a very small investment, so we're not sure if this is indeed mass production or just a pilot line.

Espon 14-inch Inkjet processed OLED

The reports says that this will be a 6-Gen plant. Tokyo Electron and Seiko Epson announced their plans to co-develop OLED TV printing technology back in November 2010.

Daimler unveiled a new concept EV (the Smart Forvision). This concept car has a transparent solar-panels on the roof, see-through dashboard and transparent OLEDs for internal lighting. Daimler partnered with BASF on the plastic wheels, heat shield and new aluminum fiber paints.

We do not know whether BASF is also involved with the transparent OLED panels. In any case, these transparent OLEDs are hexagonal - which makes us think these might be made by Philips (the only company we know of that makes such shapes, and we've seen transparent OLED lighting panels from Philips since back in 2009, so they have the technology). Anyway, this new OLED-equipped car is great looking...