Rappler, a Philippines-based news site posted an interesting report from Samsung's Southeast Asia Forum (which took place in Jakarta, Indonesia), claiming that Samsung's F9500 55" Real OLED TV will launch in Asia in August 2013, for the price of 750,000 Philippine Pesos - or just over $18,000!

That's a really high price even for an OLED TV, considering that LG's 55" OLED TV costs $10,000 in Korea. I find it hard to believe that Samsung will charge such a premium over LG's TV (DisplayMate actually says that the quality of LG's OLED panel is superior). Samsung is using direct-emission RGB OLED subpixels, which are more complicated to make compared to LG's WRGB structure. Samsung's TV also features MultiView 3D.

Back in October 2012 Nanomarkets released a new report (Markets for OLED Encapsulation Materials 2012-2019), and now they published an executive summary of this report which is well worth a read. Nanomarkets forecasts that OLED encapsulation will grow from $20 million in 2013 to over $850 by 2019. Most of the growth will come from large area panels (for OLED TVs and lighting) and flexible displays, and the most popular technology will remain rigid glass in the foreseeable future.

Nanomarkets also discusses the challenge of pricing and investments in encapsulation companies, the main one being that the market for non-traditional (i.e. other than rigid-glass) encapsulation material will remain small (not exceeding $100 million until at least 2017).

Corning says that it will take at least 3 years before we'll start seeing flexible displays based on its Willow glass. Corning sent samples of this glass to companies back in June 2012 hoping that products will arrive in 2013, but it seems that manufacturers find it hard to adopt their processes for the flexible glass.

Willow glass (announced during SID 2012) is an ultra-slim (50 um and 100 um) flexible glass that can support backplanes and color filters in both LCD and OLED panels. Willow glass can withstand temperatures up to 500 degrees Celsius, and can be used in R2R production processes (ITRI developed a full R2R process with Corning).