Last month Japan-based printed OLED developer JOLED announced that it will demonstrate new OLED prototypes (including a 55" printed OLED TV) at Finetech Japan, which starts tomorrow (December 5). Today JOLED detailed the new panels it will have on display at the trade show.
So first we have two automotive displays - a 12.3" HD OLED and a 12.2" flexible (curved ) Full-HD OLED. JOLED's latest investors, Denso and Toyoto Tsusho, are both helping the company with its entry into the automotive display market.
JOLED will also show three OLED monitors - a 21.6" FHD gaming "esports" monitor developed with Burning Core, a 21.6" 4K medical monitor (this is already a commercial product) and the 21.6" 4K ASUS ProArt PQ22UC (which, JOLED says, will finally be released soon).
In addition to the monitors, JOLED will show a 27" 4K OLED prototype, a wall-hanging display which is aimed towards smart home applications, a flexible 21.6" 4K monitor that is wrapped around a column, and a 21.6" 4K flexible OLED geared towards train/metro signage display.
Finally, JOLED will demonstrate its first large-area OLED, a 55" 4K OLED display. Last month JOLED told us that it has no plans to produce large size OLEDs at this stage - and this TV is on display just to demonstrate JOLED's printing technology.
In December 2017 JOLED started commercial low-volume production of its 21.6" 4K OLED panels, at the company's pilot 4.5-Gen line. JOLED has announced plans for a mass production 5.5-Gen line that will be established in Nomi City, Ishikawa Prefecture, by 2020.
In August 2018 JOLED raised around $400 million from four new investors - auto parts maker Denso ($270 million), major trading house Toyota Tsusho ($90 million) and Sumitomo Chemical and Screen Holdings. Later in August, JOLED announced that it has signed an agreement to develop, manufacture, and sell printing equipment together with Panasonic and Screen Finetech.
Great to hear Asus PQ22UC is going to be released a year after the first announcement.The new 27″ prototype sounds more interesting, but 21.6″ on the real market is still much better than vapourware like Dell UP3017Q and even than the rumored upcoming 15.6″ Samsung laptop even if the laptop is going to be real and not just another prototype.
It’s strange that the 21.6″ “esports” monitor is listed as FHD instead of 4K while it was supposed to be based on the same 4K panel as Asus PQ22UC.
By the way, it would be great if Asus PQ22UC had support for integer-ratio upscaling with no blur, e.g. for upscaling FHD to 4K with logical FHD pixel represented as a perfect square group of 2×2 physical pixels of the same color with no interpixel diffusion. This would prevent unreasonable decrease of sharpness during upscaling that all current 4K monitors (and their owners) suffer from.