LG Display had a very big booth at SID 2012, showing lot's of displays. The main item on show was the 55" OLED TV panel, but all the rest of the displays were LCDs. As I said in my first post from SID, LG's OLED TVs stunning with great colors, amazing contrast and excellent 3D effects. Unlike Samsung, LGD had only one TV on show, showing 2D and 3D convent sequentially (the 3D uses passive glasses). LG's OLED panel is extremely thin - 4 mm, you can hardly see it looking from the side.
During LG Display's keynote speech, they made some very interesting comments about their OLED technology and business. First of all, LG expects OLED TVs to grow at 320% (CAGR) from 2012 to 2016, reaching 11% of the TV market, while the rest of the market - LCD/PDP/CRT will only grow at 1.1%. OLED TV is the "next evolution" of TV technology.
From LGD's experience (and based on DisplaySearch data), when LED-backlit LCDs reached a premium of 50% over CCFL, the sales of LED TVs started to grow substantially. LGD thinks that OLEDs will reach a price premium of 50% at about 2015, and this is when the market will start to grow. Interestingly, at 2017 they see OLED TVs costing less than LCDs (!), and by then it will be a mainstream market.
Next LG showed some technical slides. First of all, as I already posted before, their WRGB(WOLED-CF) based panels used red and green PHOLEDs, and a blue fluorescent emitter. LGD also discussed the advantages of their WRGB (WOLED-CF) design and Oxide-TFT backplane. They say that WRGB is more efficient than direct-emission (or Side-By-Side, SBS as they call it).
This is somewhat surprising because an WRGB design includes color filters which block about 66% of the light (except for the white sub-pixel which isn't filtered). But for white this design is very effective, and they say that in smart TVs a lot of the content will be white (web browsing, etc.) - which explains their claim that WRGB is more efficient. They also say that they hope to reduce the power consumption by around 50% by 2015.
Next LGD discussed their production facilities. Currently they are using a Gen-8 fab. The backplane (Oxide-TFT) is made on the whole glass, but they cut it in half to deposit the OLEDs (so it's a 1/2 Gen-8, enough to make 3 55" panels). To reduce costs, they aim to deposit on the OLED materials on a full-scale Gen-8 in the near future.
Finally, LG announced their "near future" OLED plans, which include 4K2K (UD) OLED TVs panels (confirming earlier reports). They also see larger sized TVs (over 55") and curved displays. Should be interesting...
That concludes my OLED SID 2012 report about LGD. On the LCD front, LG showed a lot of panels at their booth: glasses-free 3D tablet panels, Oxide-TFT HD AH-IPS 4.3" LCDs and the 5" 440 ppi Full-HD AH-IPS LCD announced just before SID. You can see some photos of these panels and more photos of the OLED TV below.
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