April 2013

Update: Sony pulled off the video, it is no longer available.

Early in April Sony unveiled the new "A" Series of their TRIMASTER EL professional OLED monitors. The new series uses an improved OLED panel that sports better viewing angles and a greatly reduced color shift (this was achieved by a redesigned pixel construction). Sony published a short and interesting video that compares the viewing angles between the new panels (on the top) and the old ones.

LG Electronics announced today that it is now accepting pre-orders for the world's first curved OLED TV, the 55EA9800, in Korea. This premium TV costs KW 15 million (about $13,500) and LG will start shipping it in May. They will also bring it to other markets soon.

The 55EA9800 was unveiled in CES 2013, but we didn't think LG will actually launch it as a commercial product any time soon (even though an LG official did suggest so only a couple of weeks ago). It's still not clear whether people will actually want such a design - which perhaps enables a cinema-like experience, but probably limits the viewing area and number of people watching.

When Samsung launched the GS4, they said the Super AMOLED display uses PenTile. Back in January, it was reported that Samsung will adopt a new subpixel scheme that uses diamond sub-pixels, but up until now we didn't hear anything official from Samsung. Today the company finally did acknowledge the new design, and published two closeup photos of the GS4 display.

Diamond Pixel, as Samsung's calls their new design, is a PenTile subpixel scheme, in which there are twice as many green subpixels as there are blue and red ones. The green subpixels are oval and small while the red and blue ones are diamond-shaped and larger (the blue subpixel is slightly larger than the red one). DisplayMate says that this is because green is the most efficient (and long lasting) OLED emitter while the blue has the shortest lifetime.

Acuity Brands unveiled three new OLED luminaires concepts at Lightfair 2013 last week. The company says that the new concept designs "demonstrate new dimensions in human connectivity, made possible through interactions with the pleasing, fluid lighting expressions only the OLED source can achieve". While these are just concepts, the company does plan to launch them as commercial products and will announce this later this year. As far as we know, Acuity Brands uses LG Chem made panels.

The first concept is called Modelo and it uses square and rectangular panels to create personalized ceiling and wall luminaires. Configurations can include straight, curved, round, oval and square patterns.

Google's CEO Larry Page visited Samsung's OLED facilities, and apparently Page is "interested in Samsung's OLED business". According to some reports, the two companies may discuss a partnership on OLED TV panels, perhaps akin to Google's collaboration with LG on Google TV. Or it might be that Google are interested in introducing their own branded TV set, but I don't think it's likely they'll go for highly expensive OLED panels yet.

Samsung is already providing OLED panels to several Android smartphones, including ones made by Google's Motorola Mobility. Some reports suggest that Motorola's upcoming device, code named Google X, will sport an unbreakable OLED display. Google themselves has filed for several patents involving OLED technology (or actually software tailored for OLED panels).

4D Systems (an Australian R&D company that supplies OLED displays) recently started to ship their first transparent OLED display, the uTOLED-20. Here's my hands-on review of this great little OLED panel.

Samsung says that orders for the Galaxy S4 so far has been "explosive". In fact the company didn't anticipate such strong orders and cannot meet demand (they have a shortage of memory chips, apparently). Samsung have high hopes for the S4, and they hope to sell over 100 million units - that's double compared to the S3 (which sold 50 million units so far).

In fact all the phones in the Galaxy S series together just recently crossed the 100 million units mark. In January 2013 Samsung announced that the GS2 sold 40 million units, the GS3 sold 30 million and GS1 sold almost 30 million.

DisplayMate, the experts on display optimization, testing and evaluation, posted a new article comparing the GS4 display (4.99" Full-HD, 441 PPI) to the iPhone 5's LCD and the GS3. The GS4's Super AMOLED is a "very impressive display", and DisplayMate says that OLEDs have now reached the stage when they challenge the best LCD displays. There are advantages and disadvantages to both technologies, but we have to keep in mind that OLEDs are advancing at a much more rapid rate compared to LCDs which is now a mature technology.

Samsung Galaxy S4

Compared to the S3, the S4 is brighter by 25% (and when using Automatic Brightness, it's 68% brighter as this setting allows the brightness to reach a high level unreachable in manual brightness mode), it's 20% more power efficient (due to the green PHOLED materials) and it's got 44% more pixels per inch (and more than double the total number of pixels).

A couple of weeks ago Sony updated their TRIMASTER EL professional OLED monitors with the new "A" Series". These new monitors sport an improved OLED panel that has a redesigned pixel construction which enabled a major improvement in viewing angles and a greatly reduced color shift. Today Sony released a new short video ad showing how their professional OLED monitors compare to LCD ones:

Sony OLED technology enables accurate color reproduction, precision imaging and quality picture consistency.

Yoon Bu-hyun, LG Electronics's mobile business VP said that LG plans to launch a mobile phone that has an unbreakable flexible OLED display in Q4 2013. LG Display started working on these flexible OLEDs in late 2011 and they consider those displays to have a real value for the mobile solution (as opposed to glass based OLEDs which LG considers inferior to LCDs for mobile applications).

LG/UDC flexible OLED panel prototype

The last time we heard from LG Display regarding their flexible OLED was in January 2013. Back then the company said it was on track to start mass production of plastic based flexible OLEDs in H2 2013. The capacity will be "very limited" and they expect to be able to support just one or two customers. LG Display's flexible OLEDs will use polyimide coated substrate and direct-emission RGB sub-pixels (as opposed to LG's OLED TV which use white OLEDs with color filters).