Samsung Electronics' president and TV chief Kim Hyun-seok said that the company has no immediate plans to make OLED TVs. Kim says that there has been little progress with OLED TVs, and production is still tricky and expensive. In fact, Kim said that "I wouldn’t say OLED is our future direction".
Kim has high hopes for Samsung's Quantum-Dot LCD TV technology, and sees it progressing faster than OLEDs. Samsung claims that its quantum dot TV already outpaces current OLED TVs in terms of picture quality and brightness.
It seems that Samsung wishes to counter the recent rumors about its re-entry into the OLED TV market. In January 2016 Samsung confirmed it is developing OLED TV panels, and a report from Korea stated that the company is discussing a large investment (around $3 billion US) into a new OLED TV panel fab. This was again reported last month.
This is a rather surprising announcement from Samsung, but maybe the company does not want to pre-announce their OLED TV plans as to not hurt premium QD-LCD sales. If Samsung does indeed decide to abandon the OLED TV market, at least for now, this may prove to be a historically catastrophic decision - similar to the ones the Japanese CRT makers did when Plasma and LCD displays emerged.
This may be bad news for LG as it recognizes it will find it hard to jump-start the OLED TV market all by itself, and even officially asked Samsung to join the OLED TV race.
