June 2014

According to a new report by Korea's ETNews, both Samsung Display and LG Display managed to achieve major breakthrough in their OLED production processes. These new achievements will raise the production yields of OLED TV and flexible OLEDs.

So first up is LG Display, who applied a co-planar TFT with a top-gate structure that enabled the Oxide-TFT layer to become less vulnerable to the etching process. This results in better yields. This design has not yet been applied to the mass production lines. But in the upcoming M2 production line, LGD will use ALD technology instead of the current 2-partition deposition technology. This will reduce costs and improve process time.

Since early in 2013, we've been hearing reports that Sony (and Panasonic) are talking to LG Display about buying OLED TV panels. Today, Sony's TV chief Immamura said that he "can't say Sony wouldn't use OLED technology" in their TVs. He would not say whether LG Display will indeed be Sony's OLED TV supplier, but there isn't any other option really as LGD is the only company offering OLED TV panels.

Sony 56-inch 4K OLED TV prototype

Immamura did say that Sony has no current plans to invest in any OLED (or LCD) factory. Sony's OLED TV joint venture with Panasonic was cancelled in December 2013. And since then it was reported that Sony is withdrawing from the OLED market, but this was later denied by Sony.

In January 2014 Truly Semiconductors (a Hong-Kong based LCD and PMOLED producer) announced plans to build a 4.5-Gen AMOLED fab. Now it is reported that Guangdong's Province government allocated 450 RMB ($72 million) towards that new fab.

Truly expects the investment in the new fab and in a new AMOLED R&D center to reach 6.3 billion RMB ($1 billion). Truly sees a total investment of 17 billion RMB ($2.7 billion) in their OLED project (I'm not sure what will the rest of the money be allocated to).

Since they launched the world's first OLED TV in August 2013, LG managed to slash the price from $14,999 to about $4,000 (currently the EA9800 costs $4,299 in Amazon.com). We all hope LG will continue to lower the price, obviously, so it's good to hear that LGD's Byeonggyu Roh says that they will continue to reduce the cost of their OLED TV panel production.

According to UBI Research, LGD ultimate goal is to reach a price premium of only 10% over LCDs. LG needs to lower the costs across the board - taking advantage of existing LCD lines and equipment, optimizing the thickness of all th display layers (TFT, organic materials and encapsulation), improving the production process times and more.

The May Design Series furnishing fair chose London-based design house AB Rogers Design to design the exhibit hall. As part of that exhibition, AB Rogers installed a beautiful OLED setup called the OLED Tree Bar. AB Rogers used dozens of LG Chem circular OLED panels in a very simple installation to show how OLEDs enhance the design freedom and can be used to integrate light into any design.

The OLED panels were attached to piano wire rods by standard adhesive tapes, the cables were connected to a power driver, then the driver was plugged in. That was the whole setup. The bar design was based on the notion of sustainability, especially considering that the installations were to be torn down after the exhibition. The basic bar structure was comprised of recyclable cardboard tubes.

LG launched two new UHD (4K) curved OLED TVs in the UK - the 65" 65EC9700 (£5,999 or just over $10,000) and the 77" 77EC9800 (£19,999, or $34,000). Both TVs will ship in October for UK customers.

LG's new TVs feature the company's Color Refiner which automatically adjusts color temperature for individual pixels, a High Dynamic Range algorithm, True 4K Engine Pro for SD/HD/FHD 4K up-scaling and support up to 60fp (H.264 and HEVC H.265).

Yesterday Google officially launched the Android Wear OS for smart watches. The first devices will come from LG, Samsung and Motorola. We now hear that Asus is also developing a smartwatch based on Google's new OS version, and it will, like Samsung's Gear Live, sport an AMOLED display.

Samsung Gear Live

Asus intends to offer a cheaper watch compared to LG and Samsung, and they want it to cost between $99 and $149 when it launches in September.

LGD is still constructing its $650-million Gen-8 M2 OLED TV production line, but the company's CEO announced yesterday that LGD will invest a further 700 billion Won (over $788 million) to increase the capacity of that fab to 34,000 monthly substrates (up from 26,000).

It seems that LG is forecasting a rising demand for OLED TVs once their prices become competitive with LCDs (which should happen once the M2 is online). The company also wants to sign up more TV producers besides LG Electronics (they are currently supplying to China's Skyworth and Changhong, but reportedly they are in talks with Sony and Panasonic as well).

DisplayMate posted yet another interesting display shoot-out, this one testing Samsung's new QHD (2560x1600) Super AMOLED displays used in the upcoming Galaxy Tab S (8.4 and 10.5) tablets. As these displays are very similar to the GS5 display, it's not surprising that DisplayMate found those tablets to offer the best performing displays ever. This is yet another testimony to how great OLED displays are - and the rate of improvement in OLEDs is very rapid.

As DisplayMate found out, the Galaxy Tab S establishes new records for best Tablet display performance in: Highest Color Accuracy, Infinite Contrast Ratio, Lowest Screen Reflectance, and smallest Brightness Variation with Viewing Angle. These are also the highest resolution tablets at QHD.

A couple of weeks ago I reported that BOE showed a 55" 4K WRGB OLED TV at SID 2014. When I posted on this, I said that BOE probably used a panel supplied by LG Display (although it didn't make a lot of sense).

It turns out that I was wrong, and that panel was produced by BOE Display themselves, at the company's AMOLED pilot Gen-8.5 line in Hefei. The panel uses a bottom-emission white OLED with a color filter array (WRGB architecture). BOE also uses internal compensation technology. The 5 mm thick panel features a contrast ratio of over 100,000:1, a response time of 0.2 ms and a brightness of 120-400 nits.