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...

A few weeks ago, Philips sent me a couple of Lumiblade OLED panels to test - a blue square, and a white 'freeform'. Unfortunately the white one had some defects. So they sent me a new white panel, this one a square. It's the same size as the blue square. Finally I have a real OLED light lamp - a white one... The OLED driver that I have can only connect to one panel (when you actually buy these from Philips, you get a 4-panel driver. So I couldn't take a photo of two panels together.

Update: Philips sent us a new white OLED square, here's our hands-on review of it

The kind folks from Philips have sent me a couple of OLED light panel samples to review. Philips have started to offer these panels online, but you can't actually get them yet. The kits are not ready, and the one I got was without a proper box and manuals. As this is just a lamp, really, it's pretty simple to use. You get a driver-box, that's got a dimmer and an on/off switch. I also got two panels:

• Small rectangle in blue color (Height 43.7mm, 47.4mm)
• White freeform (height 39.4mm, width 73.1mm)

The first thing you notice is how thin these panels are. It is amazing at first to have a light source so thin. After a while you get used to it, and now it seems strange that normal lamps have to be so big! Once these kind of lights are available, I'm sure no one will want to go back...

The freeform one has a lot of 'speckles' on it. It turns out that it got damaged in the shipment (or perhaps Israeli customs, who handled it and opened it, are to blame). Philips promised to send another white panel, so I'll be able to post new photos in a week or so. UPDATE: Philips indeed sent me a new, working white OLED square... 

Those panels have 1,000 cd/m2 brightness, are up to 20 lm/w in efficiency, and Philips say that the lifetime is 10,000 hours. They are also very thin - 1.8mm in fact. Here's how they look when lighted:

The panels are not very bright, and you need several of those panels to create a lamp. In fact when Philips showed their table lamp design, it had more then 10 panels. So if you're thinking of ordering those for a test, be sure to order enough.

The nice guys at UnitedKeys sent me one of their OLED keyboards for a review. So first of all, Let's start with a quick video showing the keyboard and seeing how keys can be customized: