December 2011

In the first two days after its launch, Sony sold 321,000 PSP Vitas - and were very happy with this number. However the following week was rather weak, and Sony sold only 72,500 Vitas in the whole week following the first two days. There were some reports of stock shortages and it seems that some customers are waiting for bug fixes, but in any case this is quite a disappointment for Sony. The Vita will launch in the US and the EU on February 22nd, 2012. You can already pre-order it over at Amazon.com ($249 for the Wi-Fi model and $299 for the 3G/Wi-fi model).

The Vita features a 960x544 5" touch AMOLED display (made by Samsung), a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 processor and a quad-core PowerVR (SGX543MP4+) GPU (Sony says that it is as powerful as a PS3), Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and 3G (AT&T, optional).

Samsung announced today that they shipped over a million Galaxy Note phones. The company considers this a great success as they have invented a new market with this phone-tablet hybrid, and the phone isn't shipping in the US yet (Samsung does have plans to introduce it in 2012). It took Samsung about 2 months to sell a million Notes. The Galaxy SII sold over 2 million units in the first 30 days...

Samsung's Galaxy Note is a large Android v2.3 phone (or mini-tablet?) with a 5.3" Super AMOLED display with an HD resolution: 1280x800. Other specs include a dual-core 1.4Ghz processor, 8mp camera, touch display with pen input (it has a stylus). The phone is 9.65mm thick and weights 178 grams.

So, 2011 is almost over - and it was another exciting year for the OLED industry (here's our list of most popular 2011 stories, by the way). The biggest AMOLED player is still Samsung - and they enjoyed great success. During 2011 Samsung launched Super AMOLED Plus displays - which use a normal RGB matrix. They keep producing Super AMOLED (Pentile) displays too, and even reached HD resolution using these on some phones. Samsung's own Galaxy S II phone (which uses a 4.3" Super AMOLED Plus display) was a huge success - and is in fact Samsung's fastest selling phone ever.

But Samsung is not just targeting phones and digital cameras. Larger AMOLEDs are coming too. Samsung is producing the 5" AMOLED used in Sony's PSP Vita, and Samsung's own Galaxy Note phone has a 5.3" Super AMOLED HD display. In September the company announced the largest Super AMOLED display yet - a 7.7" 1280x800 panel that will be used in the upcoming Galaxy Tab 7.7 Android tablet (which will be released soon).

Update: LG Electronics revealed the model number (55EL9600) and posted some new photos and more details on the OLED TV...

LG Display announced that they will unveil a new 55" OLED TV panel at CES 2012, and offered some more details and a couple of photos. Last month LG said that their OLED TVs will be available in the middle of 2012. The panel is only 5mm thick, and is also lighter than LCD panels. It features a 100,000:1 contrast ratio, fast refresh rates and a wide color gamut (wider than LCD, according to LG). They also say that the TV is more power efficient than an LCD TV, but they wouldn't give any details yet.

LG Display's panel uses an Oxide-TFT backplane (this was announced before). According to LG this backplane offers an identical image to LTPS panels, while being significantly cheaper. The TV uses a white-OLED with color filter design (this was the technology LGD acquired from Kodak back in 2009).

Researchers from Dresden's University of Technology (TU Dresden) developed new highly efficient white top-emitting OLED design that feature "outstanding" color quality, and is compatible with flexible OLEDs. In this new design a refractive index matched microlens film was laminated to the top-emitting OLED to form direct optical contact. This enabled the researchers to achieve a CRI of 93, CIE coordinates of (0.472, 0.430) and an emission from 410 to 750 nm that almost spans the complete visible spectrum (380 to 780 nm). The efficiency is up to 30 lm/W (on par with the latest record white OLEDs from Novaled and OSRAM).

The lamination of such an outcoupling structure should be fully roll-to-roll compatible and even allows to be used as an encapsulation film when water and oxygen barriers are added.

In the holidays and end-of-the-year spirit, here are the top 10 stories posted on OLED-Info in 2011, ranked by popularity (i.e. how many people read the story). Interestingly, the most popular story was later discovered to be a false rumor:

1. Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 video leaked - to have a 2048x1200 7" Super-AMOLED? (Jan 22)
2. Super AMOLED Plus resolution explained (Feb 14)
3. LCD vs Super AMOLED vs Super AMOLED Plus (Feb 18)
4. Toshiba shows an ultra-thin flexible 3" OLED display prototype (May 18)
5. Super AMOLED Plus resolution - further details (Feb 16)
6. Samsung shows us what's possible with a transparent flexible AMOLED (Dec 5)
7. Super AMOLED HD is real, Samsung developed an improved process, new materials (Aug 17)
8. Corning - a day made of glass (Feb 16)
9. Mitsubishi installed a 6-meter OLED 'sphere' in Tokyo's Science Museum (Jun 1)
10. LG Display: we'll start producing OLED TVs in 2013 (Mar 13)

We'd like to wish the entire OLED community a very happy holidays period, and an awesome new year!

Oh, what you see above is a cool OLED Christmas tree made by OSRAM's OLED team... thanks for sending this Steven!

Today we are introducing three new sections here on OLED-Info, allowing easy access to some of our resources. The first section is the new Videos index, a great way to find OLED related videos. The second section is the OLED product reviews, which lists OLED-Info's own OLED reviews. The final section is all about OLED interviews with OLED professionals. We hope all these new sections will prove useful!

While we're discussing OLED interviews and product reviews - we're always on the lookout for these. We love to get OLED products for a review here, and we're always keen to conduct interviews with OLED professionals and researchers.

Atmel announced that Samsung is using their maXTouch E Series single-chip touch controller in the Focus Flash, Focus S, Galaxy Tab 7.7, the Galaxy S and the Galaxy Note. Atmel's maXTouch E touch controllers offer a single-chip solution that has an updated capacitive touch engine (CTE) that features new noise avoidance and noise suppression capabilities. According to Atmel, the new controllers has an improved performance in every aspect compared to their older generation controllers - higher fidelity touch sensing, faster responsiveness, lower power consumption and thinner form factors.

Sony's HMZ-T1 is finally shipping in the US for $899. Sony's HMD features dual 1280x720 0.7" OLED microdisplays (made by Sony) - offering the same experience as watching a 750" display from 20m. The unit comes with an external processor box offering HDMI intput and output (you cannot use the HMD without the processor box).