We're launched a new branding drive here at OLED-Info, and the first step is a new logo. It's not very different from our old logo - which has been around for exactly ten years now - it's more of a face lift. We hope you like it.
In the near future, you will notice several changes here, this is just the first step. Stay tuned!
Universal Display reported their financial results for Q4 2014 - $56.2 million in revenues (up 13% from Q4 2013) and a net income of $16.5 million (and an income tax benefit of $41.4 million).
For the full year 2014, UDC generated $191 million in revenues (up 30% from 2013) and a net income of $32.7 million (excluding the tax benefit in Q4). In 2014, UDC generated $47.3 million in operating cash flow (compared to $45 million in 2013).
LG Electronics officially announced their spring 2015 TV lineup, launching several new TVs. Unfortunately, while LG announced six new models during CES, currently they announce just one - the 65" EG9600, which will cost $8,999. LG also said that they will continue to offer the 55" FHD 55EC9300, with the official price set at $3,499 (earlier today we reported that this OLED TV can be bought for less than $2,400 at some retailers).
LG EG9600 OLED TV
According to an earlier report, LG's first OLED to launch in 2015 was supposed to be the 55EG9600 (for $5,499), and a total of four new models were supposed to ship within weeks.
Last month Apple said that they will ship the Apple Watch in April 2015. Today Apple announced that they are hosting a press event on March 9th - with the message on the invite saying "spring forward". It's highly likely that during this event Apple will officially launch their first wearable device, and hopefully provide all the technical details about the display.
Hopefully Apple will finally unveil the actual display type used in the Watch. In the-launch event they said it uses a "flexible Retina display", which can mean anything. According to several trusted sources, the Watch uses a flexible OLED display.
Several online retailers are now offering LG's 55EC9300 (the 2014 55" curved Full-HD OLED TV) for less than $2,400 - the lowest price ever for an OLED TV. Amazon still lists it at $2,799.
The 55EC9300 is a 55" curved FHD OLED TV, based on LG's WebOS smart TV platform. The TV features a 240Hz refresh rate and a brightness of 500 cd/m2. In two weeks LG is going to launch its 2015 55" curved TV that features 4K resolution, so retailers are probably eager to get rid of last year's OLED TVs.
LG's new flexible OLED phone, the G Flex 2, is now on sale in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Singapore and Hong Kong. Price vary from $504 at Sprint (on contract) to $820 in the UK (unlocked). You can also buy it unlocked at Amazon.com for $709 (international version).
The G Flex 2 uses a plastic-based flexible OLED display (5.5", Full-HD, 403 PPI) that curves from top to bottom, with a curvature radius of 700 mm. The G Flex 2 has self-healing back coating, a Snapdragon 810 Octacore 2Ghz CPU, 2GB of RAM, LTE, 16/32 GB of storage, 13 MP camera, fast-charging battery and Android 5.0 Lollipop.
Today we moved OLED-Info to a new web server. This new server is a lot faster than our previous one, and hopefully you'll notice that the site is now displayed somewhat faster. In the past few months we had server service outages (mostly due to server load, because our traffic increases), and hopefully the new server won't have these issues.
If anyone sees any errors or weird behavior, please let us know and we'll fix it. Enjoy the new, faster, OLED-Info!
Reuters reports that LG said it plans to partner with Chinese and Japanese firms with an aim to make OLED TVs more mainstream.
Panasonic 65-inch OLED TV prototype
This isn't really news, as LG Display already supplies OLED TV panels to several companies in China (including Skyworth, Changhong, Haier, Konka and KTC) and is also collaborating with Panasonic and Grundig. LG Display has been in talks with Sony and Panasonic to supply OLED panels since at least January 2013.
According to CNet, two US retailers (B&H and Adorama) posted pages with information on LG's 2015 OLED TVs, including prices (the pages have been removed from the sites since). CNet says that they talked to Adorama and B&H, who said said that they expect all models to ship within 3-4 weeks (including the 77" bendable TV, which isn't likely), and the 55EG9600 will ship on March 9.
Here's the full price list from both sites:
A few weeks ago we reported that Konica Minolta shipped 15,000 flexible OLED lighting panels to a Japanese Tulip festival. The panels are embedded in tulip flowers. Today we got this video showing the installation in action, and we also learned that in total there are 5,000 tulips - as each one has 3 petals with OLED panels (so 3 OLEDs per Tulip).
These are the first OLED panels that were produced at Konica' new $100 million R2R flexible OLED lighting fab. This breakthough fab, will have a monthly capacity of a million panels at full capacity, and it produces both white and color-tunable flexible panels. The white panel is 150x60 mm in size (0.35 mm thick) and weights 5 grams. The color-tunable is smaller (50x30 mm, 0.29 mm thick, 0.6 grams). Both panels are flexible with a curvature radius of 10 mm.
