July 2013

My friend Raymond Soneira from DisplayMate wrote an interesting article for the SID Information Display magazine on Tablet displays technologies in real world ambient light. The displays obviously progressively degrades as ambient light is increased, and Raymond then shows how you can compensate and correct images by by dynamically modifying the color gamut and intensity scale.

The article points out the importance of using a managed wide color gamut in displays. Here OLEDs (and also LCDs with Quantum Dots) have an advantage obviously over regular LCDs. This basically means that by having a wider color gamut, a display can be made to look better under ambient light.

AT&T now ships Nokia's Lumia 1020 - from $269. The Lumia 1020 is an imaging-focused Windows Phone 8 smartphone. It's got a 41-mp camera, OIS, BSI, lossless zoom, six Carl Zeiss lenses and xenon flash (stills) and LED flash (video). The display is a 4.5" AMOLED PureMotion HD+ panel (1280x768).

Researchers from MIT's Media Lab developed a new interactive ruler which they call Glassified. The ruler includes a transparent OLED panel and a Wacom digitizer. So when you draw using the ruler, the digitizer captures the input, and then you can put the transparent OLED on top of the drawing to interact with it, for example to measure angles or animating the drawing. This is really nice:

The researchers are using 4DS Systems' uTOLED-20 transparent PMOLED (I posted a hands-on review back in April). The uTOLED-20 is a 2" 128x160, 65K color display. It costs $179 for one sample.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo developed a highly-flexible OLED lighting device that can work even after being completely bent and crumpled. They hope that this device can be used for medical and healthcare sensors.

The flexible panel uses a metal electrode (LiF/Al), a transparent PEDOT:PSS transparent electrode and a polymer substrate. The minimum bending radius is 10 micrometer and the brightness of the panel is 100 cd/m².

Update: the G2 is now official, and it sadly uses an IPS-LCD display

LG will launch their new flagship Android handset, the G2 on August 7th. Meanwhile, the company announced today an accessory for this phone, the QuickWindow case. This premium case includes a small window so the phone can display information when the case is closed (you'll have to swipe your finger to activate the display). LG calls the graphic interface itself QuickWindow UX, and it includes a clock, weather report, alarms, music and phone/messages notifications.

This is a neat idea, although it isn't new. Samsung offers a similar idea in their S View Cover case for the GS4. OLEDs have a clear advantage over LCDs here - as only lit pixels draw power, while in LCDs even if the rest of the display is black, the BLU unit still lights up the whole panel. So these kinds of ideas really make sense with an OLED display, not an LCD one. Is it possible that the G2 will adopt an OLED display?

OSRAM posted an interesting article which basically states that the next technological development for car lighting is OLEDs. As LEDs are already a standard in car lighting, the company is now developing OLEDs, whose major advantage (according to Osram) is that they provide "completely new options for the design of light and luminaires". The cars of the future, according to Osram will have both LED and OLED lighting sources.

Last year Osram presented OLEDs that were able to resist the high temperatures (at least 85 degree Celsius) required by the automobile industry. Back in 2012 those OLEDs resisted such high temperatures for several hundred hours, but the development continues and today the panel's high temperature resistance has been improved to several thousand hours. Now the company is tackling future use in commercial cars. This is great news but of course this will take time - "the automotive sector plans and develops its future models with very long lead times".

According to reports, Samsung is close to acquire Novaled for $200 million. This isn't really surprising - back in April 2013 it was reported that Samsung's Cheil Industries was considering to bid for Novaled. Perhaps the deal will happen soon and that's why it leaked to the press. Samsung already owns 10% of Novaled.

Novaled filed for IPO back in March 2012, aiming to raise $200 million but this IPO was never completed. In march 2013 we reported that Korea's Doosan will acquire Novaled, but in two months later the Korean company decided it will not acquire the German OLED material developer.

LG's curved 55" OLED TV (the 55EA9800) is now shipping in Korea (for around $13,500) and in the US (exclusively through Best Buy for $14,999). LG Electronics published a nice video about the design team behind this curved OLED TV:

LG's 55EA9800 features an Oxide-TFT WRGB Full-HD OLED panel (like LG's 55EM9700 OLED TV). The TV features "infinite" contrast ratio, passive 3D, Smart Touch Controls and a "paper-slim" design (it's only 4.3 mm thick and weighs just 17Kg). It is made from Carbon Fiber-Reinforced Plastic (CFRP). According to Pocket-Lint's review, it is "jaw-droppingly stunning".

Merck posts an interesting presentation detailing the company's OLED business. And it includes some interesting details. So first of all, Merck says that if OLEDs advances further, it could gain a meaningful share in the TV market. In fact, they forecast OLED panels to grab 10-15% of the total display market by 2019. By surface area, the market will grow to around 50 km², mostly from OLED TV applications.

Merck is still focused on OLED printing technologies over evaporation technologies as the technological advantages will enable cheaper large area panels. According to this presentation, in 2010 Merck started to collaborate with Epson on printable OLEDs (which is interesting as officially they announced this alliance in October 2012). Anyway Merck says that this alliance created a "significant momentum" in OLED printing technology. as you can see from the chart below which shows Merck's OLED development advances over time:

Samsung released their audited results for Q2 2013 (preliminary results were released a couple of weeks ago) - the company generated revenues of 57.46 trillion won ($51.5 billion) and a net profit of 7.77 trillion won ($6.96 billion). This was a disappointment to investors as smartphone growth is slowing (mostly GS4 sales).

But there are some good news in that report for the OLED market. First of all, Samsung is reporting positive growth for OLED displays for high-end smartphones, and they expect this growth to be maintained in the second half of 2013. Samsung will focus on offering "differentiated smartphone displays" using new technologies such as flexible displays. They will also focus on enhancing OLED cost competitiveness and will expand the OLED product line-up and feature more sizes and high resolution displays.