April 2015

Philips announced a new OLED lighting panel, the Brite FL300 L which is a long (46x222 mm) version of the FL300 OLED. The panel features a brightness of 300 lumens, efficiency of 40-50 lm/W, a color temperature of 3,000K, nominal CRI of 80 and a lifetime rating of 10,000 hours at 300 lm (50,000h at 115 lm). It will ship in Q3 2015 and you can find a preliminary datasheet here.

Philips also launched a new OLED-focused lighting magazine, which can read online here. Philips' idea is to show what is possible with OLED lighting, and the magazine includes many design prototypes, OLED products and interviews with lighting designers.

In the past few weeks we heard reports that Samsung Display decided to re-enter the OLED TV market - and some reports even suggested that Samsung aims to use LG's WRGB architecture. During the company's quarterly conference call, a Samsung Display official said that there are no plans to re-enter the OLED TV market in the near future as "OLED TVs are not in sight for the time being".

Samsung released their first OLED TV, the KN55S9C, back in June 2013. The TV was available worldwide for a short time for around $10,000, and then dropped to around $6,000 (and even lower) - but Samsung soon stopped production and never released another TV. Samsung officials repeatedly said that Samsung will not resume OLED TV production until 2016 or 2017.

In September 2013, Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron (TEL) announced that the two companies will merge into a new company to be called Eteris.

Today, more than 18 months after the announcement, it was reported that the merger was cancelled due to regulatory concerns. It turns out that the US Department of Justice told the companies that their proposals for a combined business were not good enough to replace the competition lost from a merger.

Dow Chemical reported their financial results for Q1 2015. The results were good - with increased earnings and record cash from operations, but the company actually reported lower OLED material sales.

Dow Chemical is a provider of OLED materials to Samsung Display, so this is a bit surprising as Samsung actually saw an increase in OLED shipments. It may be that Samsung changed suppliers for some materials.

Samsung reported their financial results for Q1 2015 - the company's six consecutive quarterly decline in earnings, due to slowdown in its smartphone business. Samsung says it sees a pickup in its smartphone sales. Samsung Display actually saw a 12% increase in sales - mostly due to increased OLED and premium TV panel shipments.

Samsung's OLED shipment increase was apparently mostly to "new premium products" - which probably means the well-received GS6 and GS6 Edge.

UBI Research sees fast growth ahead for white-OLED displays (WRGB) in the next five years. Currently WRGB is only used in OLED TV panels (made by LG Display) and all OLED microdisplays, but UBI says the technology will be adopted in small and medium sized panels as well.

UBI sees over 150 million WRGB OLEDs produced in 2020, out of over a billion OLED displays in total - so WRGB displays will account for 15% of the OLED market. Not all of these will be large OLED TV panels of course. In terms of revenue, WRGB OLEDs will generate over $13 billion in 2020 - most of which will come from large-sized OLED panels.

Taiwan's AU Optronics reported their financial results for Q2 2014, and during the company's conference call they discussed the AMOLED program. AUO seems to be shifting its OLED focus from smartphone displays to wearables.

The company updated that the new 1.4" circular AMOLED display will ship in Q2 2015. They say it was qualified by a Tier-1 Chinese customer. This could mean Huawei - which launched a circular 1.4" AMOLED smartwatch that will indeed ship in Q2 (although the display at Huawei's Watch could also be made by EDO, we're not sure yet).

Earlier this year Philips announced its intention to spin-off its OLED activity, and the company started searching for a buyer for its whole OLED business activity. Today it was announced that US-based OLEDWorks will buy the key parts of Philips OLED lighting business.

Philips will establish a new legal entity and transfer key parts of its OLED business, including the production facility located in Aachen, Germany, and relevant IP. This new entity will then be sold to OLEDWorks, which will be granted a license by Philips to market its OLED light source components under the Philips brand. Philips will remain a distributor of the panels through its OEM sales channels.

Finding your way through the fragmented OLED market can be challenging. Several producers offer many types of displays: from simple character PMOLEDs to large flexible AMOLED panels and from small transparent displays to circular full-color smartwatch displays.

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My friend Raymond from DisplayMate posted the first review of Apple's Watch display. It's a great article and well worth a read. His main conclusion is that the Flexible OLED display is excellent, and Apple did a very good job in its implementation. In fact Raymond says that "there is absolutely no question that for smart watches, OLED is the only way to go for a great display".

The OLED provides very nice and accurate colors and a pleasing picture quality. It compares very good to the iPhone 6's LCD display. DisplayMate tested a single edition, one with a Sapphire display (more about this below). This is a 42 mm panel (312x390, 302 PPI) - most likely made by LG Display.