LG Chem - Page 4

Alkilu was established in 2013 with an aim to develop innovative consumer OLED lighting products, and the company unveiled their low cost OLED products at CES 2014. While some of their products are already shipping, Alkilu now launched a Kickstarter campaign for the TripLit portable OLED light.

The TripLit OLED panel is about 100x100 mm in size, and has a color temperature of 3000K (yes, that's all we know). The TripLit has a Li-Polymer battery that lasts for more than 30 hours (coupled with a solar charger, this is pretty neat). As part of the campaign, you can get it for $61.

LG Chem started developing "truly flexible" plastic-based OLED panels back in 2013, and they recently finished that development effort with sample production already underway. The company now released this video showing the panels undergoing some flexibility tests (including the hammer test):

Currently LG Chem offers samples for $250 each, and mass production of these panels is expected by July 2015 - which will also mean a lower price. Those panels offer 60 lm/W, 75 lumens, a color temperature of 3,000K and a CRI of over 85. The bending radius is 30 mm.

IDTechEx posted a very interesting analysis of the OLED lighting market, in which they see the OLED market growing very slowly - it will remain smaller than $80 million until 2017. The market will start picking up to reach $840 million in 2022 - still a very small slice of the global lighting market.

IDTechEx says that OLED technology is very slow to close up to performance and cost gap to LED based lighting. In addition, following the recent Philips OLED BU sale to OLEDworks (and Panasonic decision to dissolve its OLED lighting activity back in March 2014), the only two major companies left in the OLED market is LG Chem and Konica Minolta.

Acuity Brands announced new luminaries that use both LED and OLED light sources. Acuity Brands calls this new technology "Duet SSL", saying that "the interplay of the two solid-state technologies effectively combines the focused and directed light benefits of LEDs with the soft, uniform glow of OLEDs, offering specifiers new and more dynamic ways for lighting a space".

Acuity Brands announced two new concept Duet SSL families, the Imoni and Olessence, which you can see above. Each product family features several form factors and applications. We assume these new lamps adopt LG Chem's OLED panels, as in most of Acuity Brand's OLED luminaires.

LG Chem published a new video showing the company's booth at Euroluce 2015:

You can see LG's OLED portfolio (including their flexible OLEDs), the new connection options and mounting solutions and lot's of luminairies and installation ideas.

Towards the end of 2014, Home Depot started to offer several Acuity Brands OLED luminaries, with prices starting at $199. This was exciting - as these are the cheapest OLED lamps ever, and it is the first time OLEDs are offered at a major retail channel.

The nice guys at Acuity Brands sent me a Chalina 5-panel OLED luminaire (wall-mountable version) for a review here at OLED-Info. So first of all I want to thank Acuity for this. I will post a short review, focusing mostly on my experiences with this lamp, and people's reaction to it.

According to the Korea Times, LG Display is in talks to acquire Global OLED Technology (GOT), the IP holdings company that owns over 2,000 OLED related patents originally created by Kodak. GOT was formed in 2009 following LG's $100 million purchase of Kodak's OLED business unit.

LG Display already acquired the GOT shares owned by LG Electronics - which gave a value of $156 million to GOT. LGD now owns 65% of GOT, with the rest being owned by Idemitsu Kosan (33%) and LG Chem (2%).

LG Chem published two interesting videos today. The first one shows the company's booth at the Lighting Fair 2015 tradeshow which took place last month in Japan. It's a great video that showcases the company's latest panels, their new integration solutions and some great new OLED luminaires:

The second video shows the new OLED desk lamps installed at Seoul National University's Library. LG Chem says that this is the world's largest OLED "building installation" as it uses 1,100 OLED panels:

According to reports from Japan, LG Chem is planning to construct a new production line for OLED lighting by 2017. According to the reports, LG Chem will commit 200 billion Korean Won ($185 million) towards this new fab, which will increase its production capacity and will lower prices dramatically.

LG Chem started discussing the Gen-5 line back in 2012 (and the plan was to build it by 2015), but hopefully this time the company will actually execute the expansion plan. The OLED Association says that LG Chem has seen great advances in panel performance, cost reduction, production yields and in-house material adoption, and the company executives believes now is the time to increase capacity and finally start mass producing OLED panels.