Kaneka announced that it will start accepting orders for OLED lighting panels on March 22nd, 2011 in Japan (and later in April in Europe). Kaneka will offer OLED square panels in five colors (warm white, red, orange, blue and green). The panels will be dimmable (in the range from 1,000cd/m2 to 5,000cd/m2).
Kaneka's OLED panels will cost around ¥2 million (approx $24,000) per square meter - and the company believes that the price will drop to ¥200,000 ($2,400) next year and to ¥50,000 ($600) or less by 2020. Production capacity in 2011 will be 10,000m2 - and this will grow to 100,000m2 in 2015. Kaneka panels will not be very efficient - around 20lm/W and will offer around 10,000 hours lifetime. But the company plans to improve this to about 60lm/W and 25,000 by 2014.
Kaneka is also showing some new OLED lamp prototypes (shown above and below). The "Light Object" above uses three separate lamps which you can arrange in various ways. Each lamp has its own battery (lasts for an hour) and the base is the charger. In the desk lamp (shown below) the base acts as a dimmer and an on/off switch - which you can simply control by touching.
Kaneka aims to achieve ¥20 billion ($240 million) in sales within five years and ¥100 billion ($1 billion) in sales within 10 years. The company also announced that they acquired the OLED lighting business of Tohuko Device. Kaneka will only produce OLEDs on glass using vapor deposition and does not have any plans to print OLEDs.
