In early 2014, Pioneer and Mitsubishi Chemical announced that they began to mass produce OLED lighting modules made with a "wet coating system". Soluble OLED processes should offer a great production cost reduction - but Mitsubishi's panel suffered from limited lifetime (15,000 hours).
According to a new report from Japan, Mitsubishi managed to double the lifetime, and their newest panels offer 30,000 hours. This was achieved by new longer-lasing OLED materials and a different device structure. Mitsubishi already shipped panel samples to lighting equipment makers and will setup up their marketing effort soon via their Pioneer JV (MC Pioneer OLED Lighting).
According to the report, the OLED modules are 300x420mm in size - which would make them the world's largest OLEDs on the market (larger than LG's 320x320 mm panels). But I'm not sure if that size is correct.
This is a great achievement by Mitsubishi. Evaporable OLED materials still offer a higher lifetime. Kaneka for example recently developed 50,000 hours panels while LG Chem is upgrading all their commercial OLED panels to reach 40,000 hours. Of course it is very difficult to actually compare the lifetime as the companies do not usually reveal the actual measurement.
Lifetime measurement means how many hours it takes for the panel to reach a certain percentage of the original brightness. LT90 means the time it takes to reach 90% brightness (i.e. a 10% drop in brightness) while LT70 reaches 70%. We do not know what Mitubishi uses in this case (or Kaneka and LG, for that matter).
Just a note;
Pioneer has been a UDC customer for years.
Mitsubishi Has been working with UDC Since 2006 on Ink Jet printable PHOLEDs (P2OLEDS)