Researchers from Turkey demonstrated a display prototype that is printed on paper (using graphene inks). This was a very simple device, but potentially such a technology could be used to create a foldable display with interesting optoelectronic properties.

To create this display, the researchers used electro-modulation of the optical properties of the multilayer graphene via blocking the interband electronic transitions. The researcher report that the paper display has high optical contrast and a fast response time.

Only last week did LG announce the prices of its basic OLED TV 2016 models, the OLED B6 and C6, and already the company slashed $1,000 off the 55" models.

The flat 55" OLEDB6 now costs $2,997 - the same price as the curved OLEDC6. The 65" B6 model costs $5,997, and the 65" curved C6 costs the same.

Samsung has been developing foldable OLEDs for a long time, and several reports in the past few months suggested that Samsung is working on a foldable phone, to be released in 2017.

Foldable OLED concept (2013)

According to Bloomberg, Samsung actually aims to release two kinds of foldable phones - as early as in February 2017. The first one will be a regular-sized phone that folds into a small device (clamshell style?) while the second will be a 5" phone that will open to become an 8" tablet.

Leveraging on their unique, distinctive properties, OLEDs are enabling brand new lighting and display opportunities, giving rise to an entire portfolio of portable, fully conformable, feather-light and, possibly, low power high definition display devices.

Anyway, OLEDs are nowadays facing the same issues they had since the beginning: basically, OLED materials are extremely sensitive to oxidizing agents and, especially, to moisture. This requires encapsulation materials with exceptionally high barrier properties, and active fillers or getters, capable of absorbing water on a single molecule basis. The optimization of many functional properties in single encapsulating materials is a very complex materials science problem. The fact that OLED materials can also be very sensitive to heat or radiations, generates many process constraints as well.

In 2011 the University of Florida announced a new organic-TFT backplane/emitter technology called CN-VOLET. The University spun-off the technology into a company called nVerPix, with funding from Nanoholdings.

We have talked to nVerPix in the past and updated on the technology back in 2013. The nVerPix team presented their technology at SID's DisplayWeek - and it won the "best prototype" awarded. nVerPix demonstrate a working mono-color (green) 320x240 2.5" display. The aperture ratio is 70% and the brightness is over 500 nits.

In an interesting story about how LG Electronics' OLED quality control - and how the company tests its OLED TVs before shipping, the Korean company also reveals that its latest OLED TVs feature a lifetime of 100,000 hours - or 30 years of 10 hours per day. In 2013, LG's OLED panels had a lifespan of about 36,000.

In the same article, IHS is quoted saying that LGE sold 113,000 OLED TVs in Q1 2016, which is 96.4% of the market - which means that LGD produced about 117,000 TV panels. A couple of months ago LG Display itself said that it has shipped "less than 200,000 OLED TVs in Q1" - but it is still on track to sell around a million panels in 2016.

Samsung Display demonstrated an interesting new display at SID 2016, the Bio-Blue OLED. This display emits less blue light than a regular AMOLED - and thus should be healthier.

In recent years we heard several researchers state that the extra blue light emitted from LED displays is not healthy - with connections to cancer, sleep problems and other diseases. OLEDs offer a better light emission in that regard compared to LCDs, but Samsung's new Bio-Blue displays are even better.

Samsung Display developed a new high-resolution OLED display, specifically for VR applications. The 5.5" panel, on display at SID DisplayWeek, sported a 3840x2160 resolution - or 806 PPI. The panel offered a brightness of 350 nits and a color gamut of 97% adobe RGB.

This is the highest resolution mobile phone sized OLED ever demonstrated, and it exactly matches the highest resolution LCD - Sharp's 5.5" 806 PPI IGZO panel unveiled in 2015. Samsung's display probably uses some sort of PenTile architecture, though, so actual sub-pixel count is smaller.

Solomon Systech demonstrated several OLED drivers at SID 2016 - including drivers for PMOLED, transparent PMOLEDs, AMOLED displays and OLED lighting panels.

The SSD2355 was announced in 2015, and this is the world's first single-chip OLED lighting driver. It can drive several OLED lighting panels at the same time, and it has a wide dimming depth - which is demonstrated in the video below (the panel on the right is driven using a regular LED driver).

Japan Display demonstrated flexible OLEDs at SID 2016. Those WRGB panels are 5.2" in size with a Full-HD resolution (1920x1080, 423 PPI). The luminance is 300 nits, the color gamut is 108% sRGB and the bending radius is 53 mm.

JDI refers to these panels as film-type OLEDs, or "curved-sheet OLED". The panels have quite a large bending radius. What's even more disappointing, though, is that these seem to be the exact same panels demonstrated at SID 2014 and SID 2015.