PMOLED (Passive Matrix OLED): introduction and basics - Page 11

OSD Displays developed a new high brightness PMOLED targeting the increasing market demand for wearable devices. The new OLED features a luminance of 1,000 nits - which is 10 times brighter than OSD's average OLED module. Such a high brightness OLED offers unparalleled clarity in direct sunlight.

The new OLED has a resolution of 96x16 and a viewing area of 0.78 inches diagonally. OSD says they developed a new structure and used new organic materials in order to achieve such high brightness.

Update: Futaba asked me to remove the roadmap from OLED-Info...

Futaba is a small OLED producer, mainly making PMOLED panels (including transparent ones) and developing new OLED technologies. Back in October 2011 Futaba bought out TDK's part in their joint OLED company, which is now a subsidiary of Futaba. The company was kind enough to send us their OLED roadmap for the next few years (you can compare it to Futaba's previous roadmap released in 2012).

Futaba developed curved formable (flexible) PMOLEDs which they call film OLEDs. These are formable panels that can be placed on curved surfaces - but they cannot be flexed or bent by the device user. The company showed a 3.5" (256x64) full-color flexible PMOLED prototype at CEATEC 2012. Some of the panels displayed since were touch (capacitive) ones. One of the technology used in film OLEDs is the company's solvent-free liquid desiccant, the OLEDry-S.

OSD Displays now offers transparent PMOLED panels. The company offers either small monochrome dot-matrix displays (0.56" - 1.54" active area) with a transmittance of 70% or segmented displays which are larger (up to 3") and with a transmittance of 45%.

The company currently offers only custom panels (i.e. with a setup cost) and later on they will offer standard panels as well.

Pioneer developed new flexible PMOLED panels. Those monochrome panels are bendable (curvature radius : 20mm) and very slim (0.15 mm thick) and light (0.04 g/cm²). Those flexible OLEDs use an ultra-thin glass substrate:

Pioneer wouldn't reveal any more details (such as when they expect to start producing such panels). But if you look at the text on the display, it seems that Pioneer expects to finish development by next year.

According to the Korea Times, a Samsung executive (mobile VP Lee Young-hee) confirmed that the company will launch two new products on September 4 - the Galaxy Note 3 and the smartwatch Samsung has been working on for some time (which some say will be called the Galaxy Gear).

Galaxy Note II

We already knew the the Galaxy Note 3 will launch on September 4, but it's good to hear another confirmation. The Galaxy Gear, according to Young-hee, will not feature a flexible OLED display (which isn't surprising as Samsung will only start producing the panels in November and in limited capacity).

Researchers from MIT's Media Lab developed a new interactive ruler which they call Glassified. The ruler includes a transparent OLED panel and a Wacom digitizer. So when you draw using the ruler, the digitizer captures the input, and then you can put the transparent OLED on top of the drawing to interact with it, for example to measure angles or animating the drawing. This is really nice:

The researchers are using 4DS Systems' uTOLED-20 transparent PMOLED (I posted a hands-on review back in April). The uTOLED-20 is a 2" 128x160, 65K color display. It costs $179 for one sample.

Gazprom Dobycha Noyabrsk installed a 5.4 x 3.4 meter Diamond Vision OLED installation (Mitsubishi's tiled-PMOLED display) in their headquarters in Siberia, Russia. The display consists of 112 PMOLED modules (128 x 128 pixels each) in a 14 x 8 configuration to achieve a 1792 x 1024 resolution. The installer was Avilex.

This is the fourth Diamond Vision OLED installation we're aware of. The first one was in Merck's Material Research Center in Darmstadt, Germany. Merck's display measures 3.84 x 2.3 m with a 1280 x 768 resolution. The second installation is the Geo-Cosmos six-meter OLED globe at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo, Japan. This installation uses smaller modules (32x32) - in fact it uses 10,362 such modules to achieve more than 10 million pixels.

It turns out that Futaba's booth at SID 2013 was quite interesting. The company showed off their transparent and flexible PMOLED panels, and they also show the new OLEDry-S desiccant. Check out this nice video tour of their booth:

The first item they show is the Lenovo S-800 that uses Futaba's 40% transmissive 2.4" QVGA (240x320) PMOLED panel. The S-800 was unveiled towards the end of 2010, and sadly it seems that it's the only device to use Futaba's transparent OLEDs.

Back in December 2012 we posted a new Apple OLED rumor - about the iWatch: a bluetooth smart watch that has a 1.5" touch PMOLED, apparently made by RitDisplay. In February 2013 the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both posted about this rumor.

Today these rumors resurfaced. This time Taiwan's Economic Times reported that Apple had made some prototypes with a 1.8" PMOLED, but decided they were too large. Now they are testing 1.5" PMOLEDs, and have ordered a thousand units from Foxconn - for internal experimentation.

4D Systems (an Australian R&D company that supplies OLED displays) recently started to ship their first transparent OLED display, the uTOLED-20. Here's my hands-on review of this great little OLED panel.