Philips - Page 12

The kind folks over at Osram has sent us one of their new ORBEOS OLED Lighting panel for a review. The ORBEOS is a round (88mm diameter) glass panel that's only 2.1mm thick (it weights 24g). The efficiency is 25lm/W. The brightness of the panels is 1,000cd/m² with power input of less than a watt, and they should last around 5,000 hours. The panels are available now via OSRAM's
site, they cost €240 each. The panels were actually released back in November 2009, and OSRAM say that they are happy with the sales and interest so far.

OSRAM ORBEOS

Read on to see my impressions of this OLED panel, and how it compares to Philips' Lumiblade panels which were the first available OLED panels...

The OLED100.eu project has won the Best Energy Efficient project award in Europe's ICT (International Telecommunication Union) competition. They actually won it together with Beywatch (tools for environmental management and energy efficiency). Both project will get €10,000 (there were 39 candidates altogether). OLED100.eu have also send us a new photo of a large-area OLED panel (by Philips Research):

Large Area OLED Lighting

OLED100.eu is an integrated European research project to accelerate the development of OLED Lighting technologies. It received €12.5 million funding and focuses on five main goals:

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  High power efficacy (100 lm/W)
  


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  Long lifetime (100.000 h)
  


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  Large area (100x100 cm2)
  


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  Low-cost (100 Euro/m2)
  


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  Measurement standardization / application research
  

Remember the Philips Mirrorwall? It's a wall made out of white Lumiblade OLED panels and a camera, and it basically acts as a mirror, display shadow reflections of people standing in front of it. It turns out that Philips are actually offering this limited-edition wall. The price? about 10-12K€ per m² (they'll made it just for you). That's one expensive mirror... But what a spectacular one!

If you want a cheaper option, you can also rent the whole thing for about 10K€ per week (excl. transport, insurance and approx. 3
man-days for installation and dismantling). I'm not sure how large the rented wall will be (in the video it seems rather big).

Philips have lowered the price and improved the efficiency of their OLED Lighting panels. For example, the 44x47mm white rectangle, which used to cost €166 will now cost €72. The efficiency of their panels was between 10lm/W and 20lm/W. We can now expect over 20lm/W for the new panels.

Philips lumiblade blue square

Philips will also put more emphasis on white rectangular panels - as these has been the most popular from all shapes and colors. Philips also said that there have been no complaints so far, and all feedback has been good.

So the 2009 holiday season is almost here - and obviously you'd like a new gadget with an OLED display. So what are your options?

OLED TVs

Sadly, there aren't that many OLED TVs around as we'd hope for. Sony is still selling the XEL-1 (at around $2,200) - but you should hurry, as they have stopped the production line, and will soon stop offering this TV. Your other option is LG's 15" OLED TV - but this is currently available in Korea only, for around $2600. It's probably best to wait a few years before actually buying an OLED TV...

Mobile phones

There are many OLED phones you can choose from... it seems that every week Samsung releases yet another smartphone with a large touch OLED. Samsung currently offers dozens of models - including the Impression, the Moment, the Behold II, the Omnia II and the Jet. Nokia is offering the N86 and even HP recently announced an OLED phone - the iPAQ Glisten.

Samsung Moment

Digital Cameras

Compared to mobile phones, there are very little OLED digital cameras around... There's the Samsung TL320 and the NV24HD, and also Nikon's new S70 - with a large touch AMOLED, 12Mp sensor and 5X optical zoo.

Nikon S70

There's an interesting story on Philips Lighting plans over at Tech-On, which obviously includes OLED Lighting. Philips are already shipping samples for quite some time (here's our review). Philips say that currently their OLED has an emission efficiency of 10lm/W to 20lm/W.

Philips OLED panel

They have already achieved 80lm/W "in the lab", but it will take at least 3 years to achieve 50lm/W at the production level, and 5 years to go beyond that.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology (ILT) is developing a new cost-efficient process for applying conductor paths to OLEDs. The new process also makes homogeneous luminosity for the OLED panels, thanks to micro-scale conductor paths.

When you make OLEDs, you apply metallic conductor paths to the anode layer (ITO - Indium Tin Oxide - or similar materials). The size of these conductor paths plays an important role here: if they are too wide the paths can affect the luminous homogeneity of the light source. Today the metallic conductor material has been applied to the OLED surface using a vacuum sputter process which is energy intensive, has up to 90% material loss and is expensive. It is also not environmental friendly as it uses metals that has to be disposed of after use. The conduct paths are wide, and so disrupt the homogeneous luminosity of the OLEDs.

The Fraunhofer ILT is now developing a laser technique to apply
micro-scale conductor paths for the industrial partner Philips. A mask
foil is placed on the surface of the conductor which represents the
negative to the conductor path geometry later required. This is then
covered by a donor foil whose material will constitute the conductor
path, for example aluminum or copper. The assembly is fixed in place
and hit with laser radiation traveling at a speed of up to 2.5 m/s
along the mask geometry. A mixture of melt drops and vapor forms, which
is transferred from the donor foil to the substrate. The solidified
mixture produces the conductor path, whose geometry is determined by
the mask. As the process takes place in the ambient atmosphere an
expensive process chamber is not required. There is no material loss
because the residual material of the donor foil can be re-used.

More information here

Lumiotec is showing new OLED lighting panels. Lumiotec has equipment for developing 300x300 mm OLED panels (although the ones on show are 142x142mm). The panels are 3.5mm thick with a 3800k-4000k color temperature.

Lumiotec plans to begin mass-production in January 2010, which is great news. The company is in contact with the big 3 lighting companies - OSRAM, Philis and GE (all of them has independent OLED Lighting programs).

Philips has displayed some new OLED lighting designs at the 100% design fair in London. There are also some new panel shapes in there. Here are a few photos and a video of the new OLEDs:

Philips say they will introduce four new OLED lighting concepts at the upcoming 100% design fair in London (24th of September). These concepts are created for high-design hospitality, residential and retail environments. Here's a video of an older concept, the OLED chandelier:

Philips' Lumiblade OLEDs are available at sample quantities (and high price...). Here's our own first-look review of the OLED white panels.