There's an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal dicussing LG's OLED TV push. According to the WSJ, LG is currently selling more OLED TVs in a month than it did in all of 2013. This is great, of course, but LG probably only sold a few thousand (some estimate around 3,000) OLED TVs in 2013, so monthly volume is still very low.
While nobody expected the OLED TV market to take off in 2014, this will hopefully change in 2015. Towards the end of 2014 LG is expected to bring its M2 production fab online, which should increase capacity dramatically (about 150,000 55" OLED panels in a month at 100% yield) - and bring prices even lower. Even today, LG says that production yields are approaching those of LCDs, which will help them be even more flexible with prices.
LG said several times in the past that the OLED TV market will emerge in 2015. One LGD executive even went as far as stating that the company expects to sell 5 million OLED TV panels in 2015, but that seems overly optimistic even to me.
Comments
James,
I said this is over-optimistic as even though growth is fast and prices drop, I cannot see LGD's capacity in 2015 growing so fast that they will be able to produce 5 million panels (even if they start making smaller ones).
The PC monitor market (at least if we are talking desktop PCs) will probably be the one of the toughest ones to penetrate. After all even today a very big percentage of stationary PC monitors are still sold with fluorescent backlights and are not even using LED...so going to OLED seems even further away in that particular market.
I think you are wrong.
Most colorist (photographers, movie studios, etc...) use IPS panels (NEC, Eizo, Dell) for grading.
So you can be sure that if the OLED PC monitor market arises, it'll be first to replace the current IPS "pro" monitors, only then the common office LCD (led or ccfl).
Personally, I'm waiting for a sub 1000$ 24" OLED monitor to replace my trusty old Dell U2410 (CCFL) which is still a great color grading monitor.
It's highly unlikely that the OLED panel will be able to take over the entire PC market. OLED will easily conquor big segments within the PC market, but not in its entirety. Considering the construction of OLED -- similar to plasma -- it will always have some degree of burn-in. Of course there is tons of room of improvement at the LED level to negate burn-in, but it won't go away. Therefore OLED will not be suited for environments where it's common to use a lot of static interface elements. Think of the desktop or browser environments. It is a no-brainer that OLED will take over the professional video and photo processing industry however. But for consumers, future setups will most likely consist of LCD/LED for the desktop and browser environment, with an OLED on the side for multimedia.
and are not even using LED... From my point of view LED was actualy degradation terms of color compared to CCFL, and i explicitly buy CCFL panels just because there is nothing better until OLED tech arives for my eyes
Don't say over optimistic.
The sale growth is exponential (as is it should be).
The price is also exponential but downwards...
When OLED hits the PC monitor market, we can say the the era of LCD if over for good.
:D Rejoice !