The 2016 SID DisplayWeek conference that took place last week in San Francisco was an impressive trade show. We are now on the way back home but couldn't wait to share some of our thoughts. We will post several in-depth stories from DisplayWeek, but here are our first impressions.
It is clear that OLED technology has graduated into a more mature technology, and almost all display makers (including Samsung, LG, Tianma and BOE) that presented at SID demonstrated some OLED displays. The most impressive display, in our opinion, was LG's 77" 4K HDR OLED TV. The image quality was simply superb! It seems that most people we talked to agree on that point - and indeed the LG TV won the best-of-show award.
OLED is already a mainstream application in the mobile display market, and it is shaping up to look as if Apple will be moving to a flexible OLED display in 2017 or 2018 for its iPhone displays, and display makers are scrambling to be ready with OLED capacity by that time.
The OLED TV market is a completely different story, though, and only LG demonstrated OLED TVs. LCD makers are adopting quantum-dots to enhance efficiency and color gamut - and several quantum dot developers showcased the latest QD-LCDs. Our objectivity on that matter is questionable - but we found that LG's OLED TVs far outperform those LCDs. It seems that many industry professionals we talked to have agreed with us.
Besides the exhibition, we also held many meetings with display professionals. It seems that the hot topics for the OLED industry in 2016 are ink-jet printing, TADF emitters, blue light, QDs vs. OLEDs, Apple's future OLED TV adoption and the availability of small flexible and transparent OLED panels for wearable applications.
We will soon post more in-depth stories regarding QDs vs OLEDs, the displays on show and some of the meetings we held. Stay tuned!
