January 2013

According to OLEDW (quoting Japan's Sankei Shimbun), Panasonic's current plan is to introduce OLED TVs in 2015. By then they will finish development of the ink-jet printing processes, and will be able to start mass production. Panasonic hopes that the printing process will enable them to produce OLEDs at a much lower cost compared to evaporation based technologies used by rivals. Earlier reports suggested Panasonic actually hopes to start production earlier in 2014.

Panasonic is collaborating with Sony on OLED TV production technologies. Earlier this month they unveiled a unveiled a 56" 4K (3840x2160) OLED TV panel prototype that was produced using an all-printing method.

The EU launched a new €11.2-million 3-year project called Flex-o-Fab that aims to help commercialize flexible OLEDs within six years. The project partners will create a a pilot-scale modular yet integrated manufacturing chain for flexible OLEDs, and use it to develop reliable fabrication / production processes.

The Flex-o-Fab project will draw on technologies and expertise already used to produce glass-based OLEDs and flexible displays. It will look to migrate existing sheet-to-sheet processes to roll-to-roll (R2R) production to further reduce costs and enable high-volume production. The encapsulation, one of the key challenges of flexible panel production, will be the multilayer barrier technology developed by Holst Centre. The project will also develop novel anode technologies that will need to be transparent with low resistivity, reliable, robust and scalable for R2R production on foil substrates.

Researchers from National Taiwan University presented their latest project called NailDisplay. The idea is to have a display on your finger nail that can be used for several applications such as showing what's beneath your finger when it's obscuring your phone's screen (while typing, for example), and controlling screen-less devices. Of course one can also imagine a fingernail phone...

The display used in their prototype is a 65K color, 0.96" PMOLED (96x64). Obviously in the future one could use a flexible/transparent OLED that will simply be unseen when not used rather than the bulky device used in this prototype.

The German OLED project So-Light has been successfully completed. This 3.5 years, €14.7 million project (funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) addressed the complete value chain, from primary OLED materials through to OLED-lighting applications.

Blackberry announced their first BB10 devices today, the Z10 and Q10. The latter is Blackberry's first keyboard BB10 device - and the company's first OLED product, too. It sports a square 3.2" 720x720 (330 ppi) Super AMOLED display, LTE, 1.5Ghz dual-core CPU and 2GB of RAM. We still do not know the Q10 release date or price.

Last year in June we reported on rumors that suggested that the new QWERTY BB10 device will indeed sport such an OLED display. It was also reported that the non-keyboard device will have a 4.65" AMOLED but this is not true (the Z10 has a 4.2" 1280 x 768 356ppi LCD).

According to a new research by Transparency Market Reports (titled OLED Displays Market - Global Industry Analysis, Market Size, Share, Growth And Forecast, 2012 - 2018), the global OLED display market will reach $25.9 billion in 2018, up from $4.9 billion in 2012. The CAGR in this time frame will be 31.7%.

In 2012, mobile phones were the largest OLED application, grabbing 71% of the total OLED display market. OLED TV displays are expected to surpass the shares of mobile phone displays by 2015.

Nikon announced several new digital cameras, two of which sport 3" AMOLED displays. First up is the S9500, an ultra-slim 22x optical zoom compact camera with a 18.1 mp sensor, Full-HD videos and built-in GPS and Wi-Fi.

The AW110 is a rugged shockproof, waterproof and freeze-proof compact camera that features a 16 mp sensor, Full-HD videos and built-in Wi-Fi and GPS.

Update: according to some people, Sony's (and Panasonic's) new OLED prototypes actually use white OLEDs with color filters (WOLED-CF) and not RGB sub pixels with color filters. Hopefully I'll get more information on this soon...

During CES 2013, both Sony and Panasonic unveiled 56" 4K OLED TV panel prototypes. Both panels use Sony's Super Top Emission structure. Those panels used color filters, which caused some confusion, so I thought I'd explain Sony's technology.

Super Top Emission utilizes RGB OLED subpixels, a microcavity structure and color filters. Sony says that this simultaneously enhances color purity, attains higher contrast and achieves lower power consumption.

Last week our friend Dietmar Thomas (Philips Lumiblade's spokesperson) hosted a free Webinar (titled "Explore the world of OLED lighting") - updating on Philips' OLED lighting technologies and also answering questions. Philips now uploaded the webinar to the web, you can listen to it here and watch the slides:

Dietmar told us that there so many questions left unanswered, that they will setup a one hour Q&A session on twitter to follow up. It will take place on March 7^th, 17.00h GMT+1. You can send your questions using Twitter, make sure to mark them with this hashtag: #OLEDT01

During Google's financial results conference call, the company's CEO Larry Page discussed the opportunities in mobile phones. The company bought Motorola Mobility and is expected to release new phones with new technology soon. Page hinted at unbreakable phones ("when you drop your phone, it shouldn't go splat") and said that battery life is still a huge issue. Hopefully Motorola will indeed incorporate unbreakable plastic-based OLED panels in their upcoming device (some say it'll be called Google X).

Curved YOUM prototype phone

Motorola already uses OLED panels in several of their mobile phones, including the relatively new RAZR i, RAZR HD and RAZR M. Most of these Motorola's OLED phone sport Super AMOLED Advanced displays, which are 25% more power efficient compared to other OLEDs (according to Motorola's marketing, anyway). This is probably due to the fact that Motorola's displays are one of the few Samsung OLEDs that use green phosphorescent emitters, and may be the reasoning behind Page's "battery life" comment.