Philips' OLED lighting division has a new head of Marketing and Business Development - Jay Kim. Before he was responsible for OLED product marketing, business development, MarCom and customer services functions globally, Jay headed Philips' industry segment marketing in Europe involving Philips LED luminaries, lighting controls and services. And he was kind enough to agree to this interview here at OLED-Info.

Q: Jay - thanks for your time. Let's jump, shall we? In March 2014 Philips announced the FL300, your brightest OLED yet at 300 lumens. Any updates on this panel? Is it still on track for Q3?

We are very happy with the performance of the new Brite FL300 and its acceptance in the market. Already before official market introduction at Light+Building we have had three designs where the brightest OLED on the market is used. Italian furniture maker Riva1920 uses our OLED in its K BLADE lamp, an exceptional beautiful wooden desk lamp combining 48,000 years old Kauri wood from New Zealand with the world’s most modern lighting technology OLED. Besides that, German Designer Thomas Emde is using the Brite FL300 in its new series of OLED luminaires sold under the label OMLED. In addition, he is working closely together with Italian luminaire manufacturer Luceplan. Together they bring the OLALAL OLED luminaire to the market. Also, many of our customers with designs based on the Lumiblade GL350 OLED are going to switch to the new OLED as well.

LG Electronics USA is launching a new-media competition (The Art of the Pixel: Powered by LG Ultra HD 4K and OLED TV) together with renowned digital artist Mark Tribe. LG invites the top art students in the US to apply for this competition, and anyone can vote for their favorite entry. The "canvas" for these digital artworks are LG's 4K and OLED TVs.

There are nine participating schools in the competition, and the top artist from each will receive a $5,000 prize. The winning student will receive an additional $5,000, and the winning school will get a $50,000 grant.

In March 2013 Oculus started accepting pre-orders for the second-gen development kit (the DK2) - which adopts a new low-persistence OLED. A couple of days ago, Oculus said they are starting to ship the first batch $350 kits. In the first stage they will ship 10,000 units ouf of the 45,000 pre-orders they got (the rest will have to wait a bit, probably till August).

Oculus changed their design from an LCD to an OLED because they really want a low persistence display. They say that "it’s incredible the difference low persistence makes... It’s mind-blowing". The OLED display runs at a high refresh rate - it switches in well under a millisecond. This is the fastest OLED on the market, supplied by Samsung.

LG Chem just published a nice video showcasing the company's OLED booth at the LightFair 2014 tradeshow. The video showcases LG Chem's latest OLED panels, including the world's largest panel (320x320 mm) and their flexible and upcoming bendable panels, too:

LG Display announced that it signed supply contracts with several car makers in Germany (including Daimler-Benz) to supply with OLED panels. It's not clear, but it seems that the displays will be plastic-based flexible OLEDs. LG said that they expect flexible OLEDs to "fast replace the currently available glass-made LCD panels".

LG Display also plans to start producing transparent displays (probably OLEDs) for this market. In 2013 LGD generated 500 billion Won in sales of automotive displays (probably all LCDs). The company hopes that those flexible and transparent OLEDs will enable them to grow by 30% a year in the next three years - and then LGD will become the leading automotive display company.

In March 2014, Universal Display announced they signed an evaluation agreement with China's BOE Display. Yesterday UDC announced that it signed an expanded evaluation agreement with BOE. UDC will broaden its collaboration with BOE and supply additional phosphorescent OLED (PHOLED) materials for display applications.

BOE Technology Chairman, Wang Dongsheng, says that the company hopes to push forward OLED development together with UDC and other partners. BOE has a Gen-8.5 pilot fab in Hefei in which they produced the 55" 4K OLED TV sample shown last month. Hopefully this pilot line will be the precursor of a real Gen-8.5 AMOLED fab.

Researchers from the University of Iowa and New York University developed a method to convert magnetic storage data into optical transmission data. Basically this means that one can directly control OLEDs from magnetic-based storage.

It turns out that the magnetic field of the storage has enough energy to excite an OLED to produce photos. The researchers say that this method can be an optimal solution for plastic-based devices. I'm not sure I understand this completely, but it seems an interesting innovation on the road to cheap plastic-based computing devices.