October 2014

A little over a month since Samsung announced their latest smart watch, the Gear S, they now announced that it will arrive in the US on November 7th. The gear S will be offered on AT&T, Sprint, T-mobile, Verizon, Best Buy and other stores. AT&T will sell it for $200 (with a two-year contract). The watch will cost $350 on T-Mobile and $384 on Sprint.

The Gear S has a flexible (curved) 2" 360x480 (300 PPI) plastic-based Super AMOLED display and it includes a 3G chip so it doesn't have to be paired with a smartphone. Other features include Tizen OS, seven sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, heart rate, ambient light, UV and barometer) and a 300 mAh battery that should last for two days.

Earlier this month eMagin announced three new R&D project wins, worth a total of $6.8 million. The company now gave some more details on those projects. The bulk of that money ($6.45 million) will go to several projects that all have an aim to develop and produce ultra-high resolution, high brightness, high contrast, full color OLED microdisplays at a low unit cost.

The projects will be executed over the next 30 months, and upon the completion eMagin will be able to produce full-color high resolution (higher than 1920x1200) OLED microdisplays with a brightness in excess of 10,000 cd/m² and with a contrast of at least 10,000:1. Those displays will be based on new highly improved backplane technology that will be developed as part of the program. The backplane will enable a 30% reduction in power consumption compared to the existing backplane used in eMagin's microdisplays.

Last month it was reported that LG will soon stop producing Plasma (PDP) panels, and today LG announced formally that it stopped PDP production. Plasma TV popularity was in decline for years, and LG wants to focus on OLED TV as the future TV technology.

The other two major PDP makers, Panasonic and Samsung, already stopped producing plasma displays. The only remaining producer is China's Changhong (although I also heard that this company will halt PDP production soon).

A few days ago LG released the G Watch R smartwatch in Korea (for 352,000 Won, or $330) and later announced their global rollout plan for the G Watch R - which will be available in Europe in the beginning of November, while key markets in North America, Asia and the CIS will get the watch "soon after".

AT&T now announced that it will be among the first carriers to offer LG's new watch. AT&T did not disclose how much will the watch cost, or when it will be actually available. 

Reuters reports that LG Electronics decided to develop Quantum-Dot LCDs. In the long run LGE still sees OLED as the superior technology, but QD does provide "tangible benefits" for its current line of LCD panels.

LGE 55-inch OLED TV

Only a few days ago the Korea Times reported that Samsung is set to introduce the first cadmium-free QD TV in 2015. Samsung is collaborating with Dow Chemical on those QDs, and according to Korea Times LG is also working together with Dow on cadmium-free QDs.

DisplayMate posted a new review of the display in Apple's new iPads - both the iPad Air 2 and the iPad Mini 3. DisplayMate says that Apple used a major innovation in the iPad Air 2, a new anti-reflective layer coating that is scratch- and fingerprint- resistant. This results in a display that reduces ambient light reflection and performs better in that regard than any smartphone or tablet ever tested at DisplayMate.

Besides the anti-reflectance coating and the bonded cover glass (which has been used in many competing tablets and smartphones for years, according to DisplayMate) the iPad Air 2 display is essentially unchanged and identical in performance to the iPad 4 introduced in 2012 (and actually slightly lower in performance than the original iPad Air).

LG's 55EA9800 OLED TV is now offered for only $2,699, it's lowest price ever at Amazon.com. This is the company's 2013 model, which was replaced by the 55EC9300 (which is now on sale for $3,499). Both TVs use a curved 55" Full-HD OLED panel.

Japan Display is exhibiting in the Display Innovation 2014 event today in Yokohama, Japan, and the company is showing a flexible OLED for the first time. The prototype panel is 5.2" in size and features a FHD resolution. JDI refers to this display as a "Sheet OLED", which probably means it can be curved on a surface but it is not flexible/bendable.

In July we published an interview with EverDisplay's marketing team, in which they promised AMOLED mass production by the end of 2014. EDO already started shipping 5" 720p samples to potential customers, and the company also developed 5.5" and 6" panels.

A few days ago, during a conference in Shenzhen, Everdisplay gave a presentation in which they announced a new 1.63" 320x320 (277 PPI) AMOLED display panel for wearable applications, and they also showed a prototype panel. EDO told me that the plan is to start mass production of those panels in Q2 2015.

A couple of days ago LG released the G Watch R smartwatch in Korea (for 352,000 Won, or $330), and now LG Electronics announced their global rollout plan for the flexible OLED smartwatch.

The G Watch R will be available in Europe in the beginning of November, while key markets in North America, Asia and the CIS will get the watch "soon after". In some markets, the watch will be available on Google Play. Prices are still not disclosed. As we said the price in Korea is $330 - and you can't wait, you can buy the Korean version in Amazon.com now for $398.