On March 2014, Konica Minolta announced it developed the world's most efficient OLED lighting panel - at 131 lm/W. Only two months later, the Japanese company announced it developed an even more efficient panel at 139 lm/W.
Konica's new panel has an emitting area of 15 square centimeters, a lifetime of 55,000 hours (LT50) at a brightness of 1,000 cd/m2 and a CRI of 81. The color temperature is 2857K.
It's great to see OLEDs advance so quickly, and it's great to see my friends from Konica Minolta break their own records. I still do not know what's the difference exactly between this panel and the previous one. The 131 lm/W panel used all-phosphorescent design (with a new blue material) and also included light extraction technology and a new "organic layer construction technique", based on optical simulation.
Konica Minolta is strongly driving OLED lighting, and the company announced two months ago that it is constructing a roll-to-roll OLED lighting fab that will mass produce flexible OLED lighting panels (on plastic substrates). The construction will end in the summer of 2014 and mass production will commence in the fall of 2014. The $100-million fab will have a monthly capacity of a million panels per month, and will produce flexible color-tunable panels. This will be by far the largest and most advanced OLED lighting fab in the world.
