China's Jilin Optical and Electronic Materials is building a new OLED R&D center in Jinshan, China.
Jilin will invest 600 million Yuan (around $85 million USD) in the new R&D center, which according to the company will be the largest OLED material R&D center in China.
The 2019 OLED laptops are now shipping, all with the same display, an SDC 15.6" 4K (3840x2160) AMOLED.
Reviewers from Notebook Check tested the Dell XPS 15 7590 OLED laptop to see how the power consumption of the display changes with the content used.
OLED microdisplay maker eMagin reported its financial results for Q2 2019. Revenues were $5.4 million, down from $7.1 million a year ago and eMagin had an operating loss of $2.9 million (down from $3.6 million in Q2 2018). At the end of the quarter eMagin had $3.7 million in cash and equivalents.
eMagin says that the second quarter of 2019 was a challenging one for the company, as deliveries were impacted by continuing production issues and revenue and profitability fell short of expectations. The company is taking several actions to address the shortfall and are seeing early signs of progress. The company's backlog remains strong, at $11.6 million (an increase of approximately $1 million over the backlog of $10.6 million at December 31, 2018).
Korea-based Doosan Corp is planning to spin-off its OLED materials unit. The company's shareholders approved the plan. The new company will be called Doosan Solus, and will list on the Korean stock market on October 1st.
Doosan Solus will take over Doosan's OLED materials unit, which produce host materials for OLED displays. The company will also produce battery foil materials and bio components used in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
DisplayMate tested Samsung's latest OLED flagship phone, the Galaxy Note 10+, and (as expected) says that this is the world's best smartphone display. DisplayMate says that the Note 10+ sets 13 new display performance records - including the world's highest absolute color accuracy and highest peak brightness (at 1,308 nits).
Other records set by the Note 10+ Dynamic AMOLED include the best image contrast accuracy, the smallest shift in color accuracy with image content, the largest native color gamut (113% DCI-P3 and 142% sRGB / Rec.709) and the lowest screen reflectance.
DSCC updated its foldable OLED market forecasts, saying that it now expects the market to grow slower than it anticipated earlier this year. In 2019 DSCC sees 360,000 foldable panels produced in 2019, with less than 250,000 actual devices sold. By 2023, the market will grow to over 68 million units (a CAGR of 272%) generating over $8 billion in revenues.
Smartphones will remain the leading devices to adopt foldable OLEDs throughout the forecast period, and starting in 2020 DSCC sees clamshell designs with at least a 60% unit share. DSCC sees ultra-thin glass as becoming a significant player, with Samsung adopting SCHOTT UTG starting in 2020. Ultra-thin glass enables an aggressive folding radius, scratch resistance, hardness and a similar touch experience to current glass based displays.
In February 2019 LG Display started producing its 55" FHD transparent commercial OLED displays, and now the company says it plans to double its transparent OLED production in Q4 2019 - and continue to ramp up production years to come. LGD sees possible applications in shop windows, building façades and exhibition spaces.
LG Display is also working with partners such as Planar - who recently announced its 2nd-Gen LookThru (LO552) OLED displays.
OLED is an amazing technology for lighting - it creates beautiful, efficient and healthy light sources. OLED lighting has great promise but unfortunately the high price of production is a challenge that no one has managed to overcome and OLED lighting remains a small niche industry as of 2019.
In the early years, several large lighting makers (including GE, Philips, OSRAM, Panasonic, NEC and others) had active OLED lighting programs, but slowly almost all of these companies dropped out of the market - for various reasons - but the main one being that the large investments in large scale production are not certified to lead to market adoption and the competition with LED lighting is extremely difficult.
China-based OLED producer Visionox announced plans to establish a flexible and foldable OLED module factory in Guangzhou, China. Together with the local government, Visionox plans to invest 11.2 billion Yuan (around $1.6 billion USD) in this new factory.
Visionox did not provide any time frame for this new fab. The company is currently operating a 6-Gen AMOLED production line in Hebei (with a monthly capacity of 30,000 substrates) and has announced plans to establish a similar flexible OLED line in Hefei in a $6.3 billion investment.
According to a report from Korea, LG Display is discussing the sale of open-cell OLED panels with TV makers, including China-based Skyworth. The Korean's Elec suggests that LG Display will start offering open-cell OLEDs from its Guangzhou fab which is expected to start producing OLED TV panels by the end of the month.
An open-cell panel can lower the costs for TV makers as each can decide on the assembly process and driver ICs. It could also lead to more innovation and differentiation. Many LCD TV panels are sold in that fashion - but for LG's OLED this will be the first time.
