Philips - Page 3

Philips posted a 50-minutes video presentation discussing OLED lighting and the company's technology, products and projects:

Philips, one of the clear leaders in OLED lighting, recently announced its intention to spin-off its OLED unit, and the company is searching for a buyer for its whole OLED business activity.

Philips announced a new OLED lighting panel, a FL300 variant with a mirror finish. The Brite FL300 wm is not as bright as the regular FL300 (190 lumens only). The panel has an active area of 102x102 mm, and is 1.8 mm thick. The efficiency is 26-30 lm/W, the lifetime is 10,000h (LT70 at 190lm) and the color temperature is either 2,500K or 4000K.

Philips will start shipping the new panel on February 16th, and the price will be between €136 to €156, depending on the integration level (bare OLED or with cables and frame).

Philips announced its intention to spin-off its OLED activity. Philips is searching for a buyer for its whole OLED business activity. Following the spin-off, Philips Lighting will focus on LED based connected systems and services.

Philips has been one of the leaders in the OLED lighting industry for years, so this is a major announcement and a very interesting one - and only time will tell whether this move will be positive or not for OLED technology. From my contacts at Philips it seems that this is seen as a very positive development for OLEDs...

During a lecture at Lighting Japan last week, Philips’ OLED head of production Wolfgang Doetter gave some insights on Philips OLED production and the general OLED lighting market of the near future. The conclusions from Wolfgang's lecture is that the OLED market is evolving rapidly and that process knowhow is the key to producing high quality OLED panels.

Wolfgang said during his speech that for producing reliable OLEDs one needs to master the processes and needs to be able to replicate them on a regular basis. Issues like on-plate layer thickness uniformity as well as plate-to-plate thickness uniformity or the ability to produce OLEDs to a defined color point are basically the issues any producer of OLEDs has to master in order to be able to maximize the production yield and reliably deliver high quality OLEDs.

The €11-million 3-years European Flex-o-Fab project was launched in January 2013 with an aim to help commercialize flexible OLEDs. The researchers working on this project have now successfully fabricated a flexible OLED prototype in a roll-to-roll (R2R) process.

The OLED prototype (shown above) was produced on a PET plastic film, and the researchers say this is a significant breakthrough on the way to commercial production. It uses technologies developed as part of the Flex-o-Fab project in addition to the Holst Centre's own high-performance flexible barriers for organic electronics.

Audi had a nice OLED-based lighting installation at their booth at CES. They used 124 OLED panels (about 7x7 cm each) to form the Audi logo. Those OLEDs are red in color, probably as this is the standard backlight color for EU and US cars. The installation is a moving 3D one, and the Audi rings are formed from all sides, which makes it look a bit weird in the photo.

Audi has been mostly collaborating with Philips on OLED lighting, which leads me to believe that the red OLEDs used in this installation are made by Philips, but they also showed some designs in the past using OSRAM-made OLEDs.

Dietmar Thomas from Philips (and personally a good friend) is our second featured personal OLED interview. If you wish to be featured, contact us here. 

Dietmar Thomas, Manager Brand & Integrated Communication OLED at Philips: which means basically making noise for OLED lighting and being a good ambassador worldwide. In my position I switch frequently from being the OLED spokesperson to being a writer about OLED lighting and being a lecturer. In addition I oversee the communication on Lumiblade’s social media channels as well as setting up the new marketing material and campaigns… You get the idea.

What was the last book you read? Tom Clancy Command Authority although fiction and a couple of years old, unfortunately very close to today’s events in East Europe.

And the last movie you saw? Taken 3 I love Liam Neeson, no matter what he plays…

Philips launched a new OLED lighting sales campaign today, offering Brite FL300 OLED Lumiblades for just 60 Euros a piece. The 40 panel package sells for €2,400. The current price for a single FL300 panel is €136, so this is a a discount of over 50%.

Philips tells us that with this package the want to make it easier for smaller OEMs to make their first steps into OLED lighting, and they see this enabling Philips OLED luminaires dropping below the €400 price level.

Stage Entertainment built a new theater in Hamburg, Germany, and they installed 460 Philips Lumiblade Brite FL300 OLED panels on the foyer in a beautiful installation done completely by Philips Lighting.

The square OLEDs are spanning the complete wall, and they are constantly changing their light output. Philips says that Stage Entertainment chose OLEDs because they proved to offer a much more even light output compared to LEDs. Interestingly the luminaries aren't flat against the wall, but still the whole instillation looks extremely good.

TPVision (who owns the Philips brand for TVs) has been working on OLED TVs for a long time (we first reported on this in 2012), and now the company announced its plans to launch a Philips OLED TV in 2015. The company uses OLED panels supplied by LG Display (which also supplies OLEDs to Panasonic, Grundig, Changhong and Skyworth. And maybe Sony, too).

Grundig OLED TV prototype

According to a report from Holland, TPVision already showed a prototype OLED TV. The company planned to release this TV sooner, but had some major issues with the OLED panel - low brightness (compared to LCDs), uniformity issues and limited lifetime. TPV is developing its own image processing technology which will be used in their OLED TV and will solve those technical issues.