According to DSCC, 4.1 million OLED tablet panels shipped in the second quarter of 2024, a new record high, as Apple launched its 2024 OLED iPad Pro tablets. Apple quickly became the largest buyer of OLED tab let panels - with a 72% market share in Q2 2024 (followed by Huawei at 13% and Samsung at 9%).

DSCC expects the OLED tablet panel market to fall 5% in the next quarter to 3.9 million panels (but up 169% over Q3 2023), as Apple reduces its orders dramatically after the launch, but this will be almost offset by new panels shipments to Microsoft and Honor. Growth will continue in Q4, and total panel shipments are expected to each over 14 million units in 2024, over 200% growth from 2023.

According to Omdia, the price of OLED microdisplays is expected to drop rapidly in the next few years, as production capacity grows, new OLED producers join the industry,  and as wafers sizes increases as well which improves production efficiency. 

Interestingly Omdia acknowledges that new technologies are set to improve the performance of OLED microdispalys - such as tandem architectures, direct emission, and more. These technologies will increase the cost of production, and it's not clear whether Omdia takes that into account in their estimates above, or whether they assume 

Back in February we posted about rumors that suggest Huawei is planning to release the industry's first smartphone that sports a tri-foldable OLED display. When fully open, the device will sport a 10" display, which means it will double as a full tablet and a smartphone.

Now we have seen a photo of Huawei's Chairman that uses such a smartphone on a flight. This could mean that Huawei is getting ready to officially launch such a phone.

Korea's The Elec reports that Apple is planning to release an OLED iPad Air device in 2016. The leading display producer will be Samsung Display.

According to the report, the iPad Air AMOLED will be a single-stack LTPS AMOLED device, unlike the tandem OLEDs used in the 2024 iPad Pro devices. The report also suggests that the same AMOLED displays may also be used in the 2026 iPad Mini devices - as Apple aims to adopt OLEDs in all of its iPad devices in the future. But Apple hasn't fully decided on its iPad Mini OLED adoption roadmap yet.

According to reports from Korea, Microsoft has signed an agreement with Samsung Display for the supply of OLED microdisplays for a future MX device, that Microsoft plans to launch in the future (likely 2026 or later).

Microsoft agreed to order a few hundreds of thousands of units of Samsung's OLED microdisplays. Samsung Display is collaborating with Samsung System LSI, that will design the CMOS backplane, which will be produced by Samsung Foundry. Samsung Display will handle the frontplane OLED deposition and encapsulation.

DSCC says that display makers are increasing their OLED CapEx investment as demand for OLED displays is on the rise. DSCC has raised its forecast for OLED spending by 14% compared to their previous update, while they retain their previous forecast for LCD, OLED microdisplay and microLED display equipment spending. 

Between 2020 and 2027, OLED display makers will invest $44 billion in new production equipment. The spending on OLED equipment will keep growing year after year from 2023 to 2027, reaching $6.5 billion in 2027, as OLED penetration in the smartphone, tablet and laptop market is increasing, and fab utilization is increasing too, encouraging display makers to add capacity.

According to reports, Apple has cut its total 2024 OLED iPad Pro panel orders from Samsung and LG to around 7-8 million units, down from its planned 9-10 million units, as the demand for Apple's new iPads is not as high as expected.

Apple has also increased LG Display's order share, at the expense of Samsung Display. The company asked LGD to produce about a million more 11" panels compared to its previous orders. 

Researchers from China's Northeast Normal University developed a new integration strategy (called “discrete preparation-multilayer lamination”) that enables the deposition of OLED devices directly on top of OTFT transistors, to enable high-aperture wearable skin-patch OLED devices.

The new method starts with the preparation of the different layers on different substrates to avoid chemical and physical damage caused by process interferences, and then the transfer of the OLED devices onto the OTFT transistors. The researchers say that the resulting AMOLED display offers a high apreture ratio (83%), high mobility

A few months ago researchers from the Fraunhofer IPMS announced that they have developed semi-transparent yellow high resolution OLED microdisplays, that are significantly lighter than conventional combiner-based optical see-through near-to-eye systems. 

The Fraunhofer IPMS now announced that it has managed to increase the transparency of these microdisplays to 45%. 

US retailer Value Electronics hosted their annual TV shootout® (now in its 20ths year), checking high-end calibrated TVs to see which model provides the best image quality. This year, Value Electronics tested six TVs, three of which were OLEDs, and three miniLEDs.

The three OLED TVs were the LG G4, Samsung S95D and Sony A95L. As in previous years, the top performing TV is a QD-OLED TV - specifically Sony's A95L. All of the three OLED TV models outperformed the miniLED TVs, as you can see by clicking on the image above.