DisplaySearch says that the AMOLED market is expected to grow almost tenfold from 2012 (2.3 million square meters) to 2016 (22 million square meters). DisplaySearch are basing their forecast on planned investments, and they say that most of the capacity increase will be driven by OLED TV production.
While Samsung has been successful in improving yields for small OLED production (to an almost-LCD level) and thus enabling an only 30% premium over LCDs, producing large OLED panels is still very expensive - mainly due to low yields and high material costs.
In fact, DisplaySearch says that producing a WRGB OLED on an IGZO substrate (like LG Display is doing) will cost eight times as much as producing an equivalent LCD. A direct-emission OLED TV (Samsung's design) will be even more expensive - ten times an equivalent LCD. It will be interesting to see the price difference between LG's and Samsung's TVs, when they finally arrive.
The main challenges towards cheaper OLED TVs, according to DisplaySearch are the active matrix backplane, organic material deposition and encapsulation. But obviously DisplaySearch assumes that those challenges will be overcome - as the OLED TV market will be large in coming years...
But it is always difficult to change to new manufacturing process.
And it is usually more expensive to start making a new type of devices when the manufacturing process have not been used in some generations of the device that shall be made.