According to a report from China, the Gu'an county of the Chinese Hebei province aims to become an OLED lighting industry cluster. With support from Tsinghua University, they aim to build the first OLED lighting production fab in 2016, with an investment of RMB500 million (a little over $80 million USD).

OLED prototypes by Visionox

The main operator of this project will by Langsheng Technology, and Tsinghua University will cooperate with R&D. It's not clear who will actually own the new line, perhaps it will be Visionox, who was spun off Tsinghua in 2001 and already produces OLED lighting panels (in addition to PMOLED displays and soon AMOLED displays as well).

DisplaySearch says that the falling prices of LCD TVs make it very difficult for OLED TVs to penetrate the market. According to DisplaySearch, OLED TVs will not become profitable for LG Display before 2019.

DisplaySearch estimates that LGD currently loses $581.8 on each OLED TV sold. The OLED Business unit lost 535 billion Won ($491 million) in 2014. In 2019, they will still lose money - $159.9 on each TV sold. In 2019, OLED TVs will still be more expensive than LCDs. Quantum Dot TVs will also hurt OLED TV sales.

Towards the end of 2014 China's Everdisplay (EDO) started producing AMOLED displays with an initial capacity of 600,000 5" panels per month, and the company already claims at least one Chinese smartphone maker as a customer. Today Digitimes reports that the company (which they refer to as Hehui Optoelectronics, which is Everdisplay's Chinese name) has signed up HTC and Huawei a customer, with several new AMOLED phones expected later in 2015.

Everdisplay's first AMOLED display is a 5" 720p (293 PPI) panel - and it's likely that this will be the panel adopted by HTC and Huawei. On the other hand, EDO is also developing 5.5" and 6" AMOLEDs for mobile phones, so these may end up on the new phones too.

OLED Microdisplay maker eMagin recently announced a new VR head mounted display (HMD) that use the company's latest high resolution (2K by 2K) OLED microdisplays and patented optics. Last week eMagin announced it completed development of the new HMD, and here's how it looks like:

As you can see, this is a much more elegant solution compared to most VR headsets on the market which use cellphone-sized OLED displays. The display can be flipped to an up-position (shown in the image above).

FlexEnable (which was spun-off from Plastic Logic in February 2015) has joined the Graphene Flagship, the European $1 billion graphene research project. Last year Plastic Logic demonstrated the world's first display based on a graphene backplane (a 150-PPI active-matrix E Ink panel), and now we have some more details on the company's graphene OTFT goals.

That 2014 E Ink display used graphene as a transparent electrode. FlexEnable is still developing the technology, and now wants to use it in OLED displays and organic LCDs.

LG Display's CFO says that LGD expects its OLED display panel business to become profitable in a few years. LGD is on track to invite major TV makers to join is OLED Alliance, an initiative the company announced in March 2015.

He says that if they see more demand for OLED TVs, then they will invest more, and the next two and three years are crucial for the company to "gauge the profitability of its OLED business".

IDTechEx posted a very interesting analysis of the OLED lighting market, in which they see the OLED market growing very slowly - it will remain smaller than $80 million until 2017. The market will start picking up to reach $840 million in 2022 - still a very small slice of the global lighting market.

IDTechEx says that OLED technology is very slow to close up to performance and cost gap to LED based lighting. In addition, following the recent Philips OLED BU sale to OLEDworks (and Panasonic decision to dissolve its OLED lighting activity back in March 2014), the only two major companies left in the OLED market is LG Chem and Konica Minolta.

UBI Research says that while LEDs are currently the most prominent next-gen lighting devices, OLED panel shipments will grow quickly in coming years, and they see the market growing from around $100 million in 2016 to over $2.7 billion in 2020. By 2025, OLED lighting will grab about 10% of the total lighting market.

UBI says that by increasing production capacity and using a Gen-5 fab (they actually say 1270x1270 mm substrates) a 100x100 mm OLED panel can be produced for $5 or lower. In about 10 years, this will drop to $2.5 per panel - which is in line with current costs of incandescent and fluorescent lights ($1 to $3). It is actually cheaper than current LED prices (which are around $10 for a comparable device). Of course LED prices will also drop in 10 years, but UBI still sees the market expanding very quickly.

IGNIS Innovation announced that they have developed the world's first HDR mobile display. The so-called True Vision Display features a high contrast ratio, high frame rate, wide color gamut and high color precision and bit-depth. It's also very bright as required for HDR.

CSOT 5.5-inch MaxLife AMOLED prototype

Ignis will unveil their new display at SID's DisplayWeek 2015 next month, so we'll get more details. In the meantime, Ignis told us that this is a 5.5" HD AMOLED display that is extremely bright indeed at 1,500 nits (the Galaxy S6, for example, has a maximum brightness of 784 nits).

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is launching a new project called KONFECT that aims to develop flexible OLED glass for OLED applications. BMBF is awarded €5.6 million towards the three-year project that seeks to refine windable glass through lamination with functional adhesive tapes and by applying special functional layers.

The project consortium includes three partners - Schott, tesa and VON ARDENNE. Schott and tesa will develop reliable encapsulation by combining Schott's flexible glass with tesa's barrier tape while Von Ardenne will developing a vacuum coating system specifically for roll-to-roll (R2R) coating of flexible glasses.