According to reports from Korea, LG Display intends to produce OLED displays to used in professional broadcast-type monitors in 2016. These are probably medium to large sized displays (10" to 30") and these kinds of applications carry a high margin. The reports further say that Samsung Display is also considering entering this market.

Sony BVM-X300

Sony currently offers several professional monitors in several sizes (from 7.4" to 30") and in several series. Sony's OLED monitors provide a superior image quality compared to LCDs, and the cost difference is not so large because in these premium products the cost of the panel itself is a small portion of the total product cost. Sony already sold over 15,000 professional OLED monitors, and their latest monitor is the 30" 4K BVM-X300. Sony's OLED monitor success may be what's motivating LG and Samsung to enter this market.

Samsung is seeing much higher demand for the Galaxy S6 Edge, and they cannot produce enough flexible OLEDs. According to the OLED Association, Samsung Display will triple its flexible OLED production capacity - from around 3 million monthly panels to about 8-9 million by the end of the year.

Interestingly, while earlier reports suggested that SDC started producing at its new 6.5-Gen A3 flexible OLED fab sooner then planned, The OLED-A says that Samsung decided to first expand production at the older 5.5-Gen A2 flexible fab - mostly because yields at the smaller fab are better.

The first-generation Apple Watch uses a flexible OLED display, exclusively produced by LG Display. According to a new report from Korea, Apple decided to make LGD the exclusive flexible OLED display supplier for the second-generation Watch as well.

A few months ago it was reported that Apple signed up Samsung display to be its second plastic-based OLED supplier, but if the new report is true, it decided to keep just one supplier - even though LGD seems to be struggling with production issues which caused Apple to scale back its Watch production.

Yesterday I posted that LG Display managed to increase their 4K OLED TV production yields - and I said it may lead LG to reduce the prices of their latest OLED TVs. In perfect timing, Amazon reduced $1,000 off the 55EG9600, LG's 2015-model UHD (4K) 55" curved OLED TV.

LG's EG9600 TVs were introduced at CES 2015, and the new 4K OLED TVs feature a new anti-glare filter, webOS 2.0 OS and quad-core CPUs. The 55EG9600 is now shipping for $4,499, down $1,000 from the original asking price.

Researchers from Germany's Goethe University discovered that graphene doped with boron atoms feature an intensive blue fluorescence - which means that this new material may prove to be useful in OLED devices.

The Boron doping changes the graphene in two ways. First of all, it shifts the fluorescence into the desirable blue spectral range. It also improve the capacity to transport electrons. The new material is reportedly not sensitive to oxygen and moisture, unlike most boron-containing graphenes.

Oculus VR finally unveiled their first commercial/consumer VR HMD, the Oculus Rift which will be released in 2016. The Rift will use two 1080x1200 AMOLED displays to reach a total resolution of 2160x1200. Those AMOLEDs are produced by Samsung.

Oculus VR released several development-kits and prototypes in past years, with different displays. The first one used an LCD, but in the 2nd-gen HMD they adopted a low-persistence AMOLED display - in fact that was the same Super AMOLED display used in the Galaxy Note 3 (complete with the touch layer and all). Later on they switched to a dual-AMOLED design.

Digitimes research estimates that small and medium AMOLED production capacity in China will grow 373% by 2017, which will establish China as the number two AMOLED producer behind Korea.

Currently the only Chinese AMOLED producers are Everdisplay, with a 4.5-Gen production line and Visionox which has recently started to produce panels in their 5.5-Gen fab. According to Digitimes, Taiwan's AU Optronics has a larger capacity AMOLED fab (which I'm not sure is true), but growth in China will surpass the growth in Taiwan.

China's Guangzhou New Vision has been developing flexible AMOLED displays for a long time, and the company now unveiled its latest prototype. This 0.01-thick panel use a Polyimide substrate, an Oxide-TFT backplane and an RGB (direct emission) frontplane. The curvature radius is 4.5 mm.

New Vision's 2014 flexible AMOLED prototype actually used a PEN substrate - and it's interesting to see the coming moving back to Polyimide. Back in 2014 New Vision said that the flexible OLEDs will be commercialized "in the near future".

LG Display is currently focused on 4K OLED TV panels, and according to ET News, the company managed to increase production yields of 65" and 77" 4K OLEDs to 65% and they expect the yields to continue and increase and reach over 85% by the end of they ear. LGD's Full-HD panel yields are now over 80%.

This is good news which will hopefully lead to lower OLED TV prices soon. We know that LGD aims to produce 600,000 OLED TVs in 2015 and 1.5 million in 2016. ETNews says that most of these panels will be 4K OLEDs: 510,000 in 2015 and 1.29 million in 2016. LGD's goal is to produce over 5 million 4K OLED TV panels in 2018.

OLEDWorks announced that it plans to increase capacity in its OLED lighting fab in Lyell Avenue, Rochester, NY. OLEDWorks will invest $73.6 million in the new production line, and the company will get $2.5 million in state tax credits. OLEDWorks said it will hire 100 new employees for this fab "over the next five years".

A couple of months ago OLEDWorks announced it will acquire the key parts of Philips OLED lighting business, including the OLED lighting production fab in Aachen, Germany. It seems that OLEDWorks intends to operate two production lines - in the US and in Germany. Financial details of that deal have not been disclosed - it'll be interesting to see where OLEDWorks will get the money for the acquisition and the new fab in Rochester.