DSCC says that Samsung's foldable 7.3" 2152x15236 AMOLED panel (the one that will be used by Samsung's first foldable OLED device) currently costs almost $180 produce (and SDC will actually lose a bit on every panel sold).

SDC will be able, though, to quickly lower its production costs which will reach around $90 for each panel in 2022. Cost reductions will enable SDC to maintain a good profit margin on these foldable displays from 2020 onwards. The main reason for the current high prices are SDC's low yields on foldable AMOLEDs.

DSCC says that the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S10 will come in three models:

• The Galaxy S10 Light will use a 5.75" 2340x1080 flexible AMOLED display
• The Galaxy S10 will sport a 6.11" 3120x1440 flexible AMOLED
• The Galaxy S10 Plus will sport a large 6.44" 3120x1440 flexible AMOLED

DSCC also details the production cost and panel price at SDC, for the large GS10+ 6.44" AMOLED display - and how it changed from Q1 2018 (with a forecast of up to Q4 2019).

Market research firm DSCC says that BOE managed to dramatically increase its yields - which have tripled to over 30% by the end of 2018. The company is expected to continue and improve its yields which will reach, according to DSCC, to almost 60% by the end of 2019.

The increased yields enabled BOE to increase its flexible OLED production at its first B7 line from 125,000 units per month in Q3 2018 to almost 1 million panels per month in Q4 2018. BOE's main customer is Huawei - with its Mate 20 Pro. The increased yields means that panel production costs are falling - and DSCC actually expects BOE's production costs to fall below SDC's by the end of 2019 as BOE's fab costs are subsidized - as can be seen in the image below.

Wang Xiang, a senior vice president at Xiaomi published this short video in his Twitter account, showing a new Xiaomi prototype that uses a foldable OLED. The devices folds in two places:

This is a very nice demonstration, although of course we have no way of knowing how close this technology is to commercialization.

IHS released its LCD and OLED smartphone display cost model for Q3 2018. According to IHS, a 5.7" 2560x1440 rigid OLED costs $18.62 to produce, a full-display flexible curved 5.8" 2880x1440 OLED costs $22.61 and a Notch-type 5.9" 2438x1125 OLED costs $28.18 to produce.

It is not clear how IHS estimates yields - from our information SDC's production yields are much higher compared to the new makers such as BOE and LG Display - which means that yielded costs are much lower at SDC's mature OLED fabs.

Fuji Chimera Research Institute says that the global microdisplay market reached $161 million in 2018, with AMOLED taking up a market share of 27.8%. LCoS is still the leading technology with a market share of 59.7%.

Fuji Chimera expects the OLED microdisplay market to grow to $75 million by 2021 - a CAGR of 10.9%. The average unit price for an OLED microdisplay will reach $32 (35% higher than LCoS microdisplays).

Researchers from Korea's Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology developed a new perovskite-based LED (PeLEDs) which are flexible enough to fold and are also transparent. It seems as if these LEDs are similar to OLED devices and provide area-lighting and not point-lighting like inorganic LED chips.

Perovskite-based LEDs have been demonstrated before, but this is the first time a transparent and flexible one has been developed, according to the researchers. Perovskite LEDs feature high electron mobility, good color purity, and easy color control.

Samsung Display announced that it will start mass producing its new 15.6" UHD (3840x2160) OLED display panels in February 2019. SDC is targeting premium laptops, as these ultra high resolution panels are optimized for gaming, graphic design and video streaming.

At CES we saw three companies that announced 15" OLED laptops - HP with its Spectre x360, Lenovo with the Yoga C730 and Dell with the XPS 15, Dell G7 15 and the Alienware m15. It is likely that at least some of these laptops will start shipping in March 2019 when SDC can start supplying the panels.

BlurBusters posted an interesting article that uses high-speed video (960fps) capture to show the advantages of OLED displays over LCDs in terms of response time.

In the video above, you can see the almost instantaneous response times of the 10.5" 2560x1600 Super AMOLED display of Samsung's Galaxy Tab S4. In the video below, you can see the response time at 960fps of Apple's MacBook Pro 2015 (IPS LCD). Blurbusters explains that the Gray-to-Gray (GtG) response time of the OLED is around 0.1 ms - far better than the 5 ms one of the LCD.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple plans to finally drop LCD from its iPhones in 2020 - and to use OLEDs in all of the models.

WSJ also says that Apple plans to release an ambitious 2020 iPhone lineup with "a more flexible handset design". The 2019 lineup will be an "iterative change" from the current Apple lineup - and will still use an LCD in the lower-end model.