May 2021

According to reports from Korea, Samsung Display plans to build a new 6-Gen flexible OLED line. The new line will replace a current LCD line that is used to produce TVs at SDC's Asan plant (the LCD 7-2).

The new fab, which will cost around 3 trillion Won ($2.7 billion USD) will have a monthly capacity of 30,000 monthly substrates. This will increase SDC's AMOLED production capacity to 195,000 monthly substrates, not counting its upcoming QD-OLED production line.

Apple's latest iPad Pro tablets use a mini-LED backlit LCD (which Apple refers to as Liquid Retina XDR). This relatively new display technology is seen as a way to achieve almost OLED-quality contrast ratio and an improved power consumption as the thousands of small LEDs enable very small dimming zones.

While most reviews of the new display are quite positive, some users are complaining of "blooming" - the edges of bright objects on dark backgrounds tend to 'bleed' as the dimming zone is not small enough.

Samsung Display announced that its latest AMOLED laptop displays achieved UL's GREENGUARD Gold Certification for low chemical emissions. This is the first laptop display to achieve this certification (UL 2819).

This certification is awarded to products such as electronic and medical equipment that meet its volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and particle emission standards. With LCDs, the backlighting unit can be a major VOC origin due to its use of multiple plastic substrate sheets. According to UL, Samsung's OLED panels reduced the emission of VOCs to about half of LCD's emission.

UBI Research says that the OLED materials market will grow 17% in 2021 to $1.52 billion USD (up from $1.3 billion in 2020).

Korean OLED makers are the main customers for OLED materials, with 74.3% of the total market, while China producers represent 25.7% of the market. Samsung Display is still the leading OLED materials customers with 45.9% of the total market, LGD is second with 28.5% and BOE third with 13.7%.

AU Optronics demonstrated two new OLED display prototypes at SID Displayweek 2021. The first display is a 4K 32-inch 144Hz inkjet-printed AMOLED panel.

The second display is a 5.6" rollable dual-sided AMOLED display - which shows images on both side of the display.

Tianma demonstrated a new AMOLED display panel at SID Displayweek, that sports a micro-lens array that helps to decrease power consumption by 10-15%.

The so-called MLP panel is 6.2" in size with a 876x2142 resolution (373 PPI) and a brightness of 420 nits. The pixel configuration is, interestingly, YYG - yellow and green sub-pixels, which means that this display uses color filters.

BOE demonstrates several new OLED technologies at SID Displayweek 2021. First up is a new rollable display. The new display is 8-inch in size, and it features a resolution of 2592x2176 and a bending radius of 4 mm. BOE says the new display passed over 200,000 sliding cycles.

Last year at Displayweek 2020, BOE demonstrated a 12-inch rollable OLED. It has since been working with LG Electronics on the company's rollable smartphone (which was since canceled as LG withdrew from the smartphone market) and with OPPO on a 7.4-inch sliding OLED phone.

In March 2021 Tianma unveiled a new OLED display technology, which it refers to as CFOT OLED - a polarizer-free OLED that adopts color-filters instead to remove reflections. The company demonstrated a 8.03" CFOT OLED prototype at SID Displayweek 2021:

Tianma says that a CFOT OLED enables a thinner design, improves the light emittance and also cuts the power consumption by 20%. The 8.03" display offers a resolution of 2000x2544 (403 PPI).

LG Display says that OLED TV production is more environmentally friendly than LCD TV production. A 65-inch LCD requires around 5.2 Kg of plastic, while a similarly-sized OLED uses only 0.43 Kg of plastics.

LG Display says that in Q1 2021 alone its plastic consumption was lower by 71,550 tons compared to what it would have been if it produced LCD TVs instead of OLED TVs.

AU Optronics is demonstrating its new under-the-OLED fingerprint sensor, which it says is the world's largest size sensor at 2.9-inch.

A larger sensor is useful as it makes it easier for the user to sign-in, and it also enables support for multi-fingerprint identification for biometrics security. The sensor features high-resolution (1,000 PPI) suitable for detection of small child fingerprints and also includes a heart-rate sensor for added security.