September 2019

In March 2017 OLED maker BOE Technology and OLED microdisplay maker OLiGHTEK announced a new $170 million joint-venture to produce OLED microdisplays for the consumer VR and AR markets. BOE now finally started shipping its first OLED microdisplay - a 0.39" Full-HD (1920x1080, 5644 PPI) one.

We are happy to report that this new high-quality display is already listed at the OLED Marketplace, and we have access to this display at a relatively low cost. Contact us if you are interested in this display.

Samsung recently re-launched its foldable OLED smartphone, the Galaxy Fold. The company took several months to redesign and make the phone more durable... but it seems as if things are perfect yet.

TechCrunch reporter Brian Heater got a review unit, and the screen got damaged within one day (27 hours, to be precise) of normal use - see photo above - there's a large defect at the center of the photo. Brian said he took good care of the device - just as Samsung suggests. Ironically, when Samsung launched the phone in April, Brian got a unit that worked okay for a few days (until Samsung collected the device back).

In August 2017, Japan Display announced a last-resort strategic focus on OLED displays as the Japanese display maker failed to shift to OLED displays in time. Two years later, in July 2019, the company announced that it finally secured the 80 billion Yen (around $740 million) bailout plan from the China-based Harvest Group, Hong Kong-based activist investor Oasis Management and an unnamed JDI customer - which is likely to be Apple.

Unfortunately for JDI, the Harvest Group decided not to move forward with the investment after all. The Harvest Group was supposed to provide most of the funds for JDI which could put the Japanese display maker in a difficult position.

IHS Markit estimates that OLED TV displays revenues will grow from $2.9 billion in 2019 to $7.5 billion in 2025. Note that IHS is looking at OLED TV display revenues and not total TV set revenues. In 2019 the market share of OLED TV displays out of the total TV display market will be 8.6% - and this will grow to 20.6% (IHS estimates the total TV display market at $36 billion in 2025).

IHS sees OLED TV panel prices starting to decrease in 2020 as OLED TV panel makers (LGD is currently the only one) start to adopt new technologies to decreases costs such as multi-model glass (MMG), ink-jet printing and QD-OLEDs.

A few days ago the Fraunhofer FEP institute announced that it developed OLED light strips made from tiled flexible OLED lighting panels, and now we have these nice looking strips on video:

The video was taken at Fraunhofer FEP's booth at the International Symposium on Automotive Lighting 2019 in Darmstadt, Germany. The strips, produced in a sheet-to-sheet process can be connected without creating visible interruptions to the active surface. This makes it possible to produce infinitely long OLED light strips. Each segment can be controlled individually - so that different dimming or dynamic signalling can be achieved.

Update: it turns out that the display is actually wrapped around almost the entire device, see new video below:

Xiaomi is teasing a new smartphone design, with a concept model it calls the Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha. The phone uses a flexible OLED wrapped around the edges.

This is similar to Samsung's edge OLED smartphone designs which has been in production for many years - but Xiaomi is taking it one step further with the display wrapping completely around the edges.

Business Korea says that Samsung Display has finalized its QD-OLED TV production plans. The company will invest 13 trillion Won (around $10.85 billion) to convert its L8 LCD production line in Tangjeong to QD-OLED production.

According to the report, SDC's investment will be the single largest investment in Korea's display industry ever. The L8-1-1 LCD line will be shut down immediately, and converted to QD-OLED production. SDC will also shut down its second line (L8-2-1) and in total the two fabs will be able to produce 200,000 8-Gen glass substrates each month (down from the current 360,000 substrates in LCD production today). Mass production of QD-OLED panels will begin in 2022.

Researchers from the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) have built upon new understanding on organic electronic material defects to suggest ways to design higher efficiency OLED materials.

The researchers explain that they have discovered that clusters of water inside organic semiconductors can function as hole traps, and oxygen clusters can capture electrons in hole-dominated organic semiconductors. Even a small number of such water and oxygen defects can cause highly unipolar charge transport and harm the efficiency of the materials.

Samsung started shipping its first foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Fold, on September 6 in Korea, and the company now says that demand for this innovative (and highly expensive at $1,980) phone was strong.

Around 4,000 units where sold within ten minutes, and Samsung will now allocate more Galaxy Fold units for the Korean market. Samsung will start offering the phone outside of Korea soon - and in all it hopes to ship around 1 million units within one year of the launch.

DisplayMate tested Apple's latest OLED display, the one used in the iPhone 11 Pro Max (6.5" 2688x1242 458 PPI) and unsurprisingly found that this is top-notch display. Apple improved on the display used in the 2018 iPhone XS Max in several aspects - including 17% higher full-screen peak brightness and up to 15% higher display power efficiency.

DisplayMate especially notes Apple's high-precision display calibration and color accuracy - which is visually Indistinguishable from perfect.