The Daily Yomiuri posted an article stating that Sony has quit the consumer OLED TV market. The company will continue to produce OLED monitors for the professional/corporate market. This news was reported by a lot of online blogs and sites.

Sony XEL-1

But it's hardly surprising - and it isn't really news... Sony's only OLED TV, the XEL-1 was discontinued back in February 2010. And Sony said several times that it is currently focusing on the professional market, with products such as the 24.5" BVM-F250 broadcasting monitor. Sony still has an active OLED research program. Sony is also one of the founders of Japan Display, a new small/medium display maker. Sony stated that it may give (or license) some of its OLED patents to JD.

Update: The tablet actually has a 7.7" display with no Pentile, here's more info and photos

CES hasn't started yet (two more days!) but already news is coming in. This time it is Toshiba,  announcing it will show a "high brightness" OLED tablet. We do not have any official information yet, although some sites suggest it will be a 7" tablet.

This actually makes sense as we know that Samsung just added a new 7" AMOLED product which indeed features high brightness (400 nits).

Update: Samsung's 55" Super OLED TV is now official!

CES 2012 will start on Monday, but some companies have already put up some banners announcing new products. Check out this interesting one from Samsung - promising a Super OLED TV:

It was already reported that Samsung plans to show 55" OLED TV panels at CES, so this isn't a surprise. It's interesting to hear of Samsung's new OLED TV branding - Super OLED, an Ultimate TV. I guess Samsung will focus on the fact that they are using 'True OLED' RGB subpixels, as opposed to LG Display's white subpixels with color filters architecture (WOLED-CF). Samsung's design theoretically means better quality image and a more efficient display, while LGD's design should enable them to manufacture the TVs on the cheap.

DisplaySearch estimates that AMOLED revenue in 2011 reached $3.36 billion on 90 million units. Revenue grew by 169% (from $1.25 in 2010) and unit shipments grew 97%. Revenue grew faster then units because the average smartphone display is getting larger. According to DisplaySearch, AMOLED share of the small/medium display market is now 12% (up 6% in 2010).

These numbers are actually lower than what DisplaySearch estimated back in August 2011. Back then they said unit shipments will be 128 million and revenue will reach $4 billion.

I'm happy to announce that The OLED Handbook is the #980 best selling book on Lulu.com. Lulu is one of the most popular print-on-demand book publishers today. The Handbook is selling very well - it's great to see how many companies from all sorts of industries and from over the world are interested in OLEDs.

The Lulu sales rank takes into account the sales revenue and not just the number of books sold (i.e. the price of the book times number of sales). The OLED Handbook costs $149.99 for the printed edition and $97 for the digital (PDF) edition.

TechOn posted an interesting interview with Paul SL Peng, AUO's Display Business Operation president. Peng says that AUO plans to start mass producing OLED panels in 2Q 2012 (this was reported before). These OLEDs will be 4"-5"in size and feature 250-300ppi - AUO will be targeting high-end smartphones.

AUO will use LTPS for the substrate, and vapor deposition for the RGB OLED sub pixels. AUO will produce these panels in their 3.5-Gen line in Hsinchu, Taiwan. In the second half of 2013, AUO's 4.5-Gen AMOLED Line in Singapore (at AFPD) will start producing panels as well.

DisplaySearch estimates that LG's 55" OLED TV (the 55EM9600) will retail for around $8,000 when it launches in 3Q 2012. The price will fall below $4,000 by the end of 2013 as sales volume increase and manufacturing cost will drop.

DisplaySearch also says that they expect LG to sell less than 500,000 units annually of these TVs. This is actually a bit optimistic - as LG themselves said that their production line will be able to output 30,000 TVs a month (that's only 360,000 sets a year).

Digitimes reports that Amtran Technologie's CEO says that the company is interested to see the market response to LG's 55" OLED TV. Amtran does not rule out the possibility of producing OLED TVs.

Amtran is actually an OEM monitor display producer (they supply LCD monitors to Apple) - and are focused on 23" and 27" monitors. It may be that the actually mean to start producing OLED monitors and not OLED TVs.

Samsung added a new AMOLED product to their web site - a 7" WSVGA (600x1024) AMOLED display, aimed towards tablets. Interestingly this new panel is quite bright - 400 nits. The 7.7" AMOLED (used in the upcoming Tab 7.7) is only 250 nits bright.

We do not know of any product that uses this display yet - the first one will probably be a Samsung made tablet. Or perhaps this will be used in Google's rumored high-end Tablet? Hopefully one of these will be revealed in CES 2012 soon...

Researchers from the University of California San Diego managed to develop "biopxels" - made from bioluminescent E. coli bacteria. The researchers managed to sync a colony of bacteria using quorum sensing. Each colony is thus a single "pixel". The researchers produced a "chip" which holds 13,000 colony-pixels (a total of about 50 million bacteria).

This technology isn't likely to lead us to biology TVs, but the researchers do hope to develop this technology for biological sensors.