Competing technologies - Page 19

Last week Innolux demonstrated new rigid and flexible AMOLED prototypes, and the company says it aims to mass produce AMOLEDs - starting in 2017 with small-sized displays for wearable applications.

Even though Innolux is hopefully finally getting back to the OLED market, its CEO is still skeptical. Wang Jyh-chau says that OLED cannot replace LCD in terms of performance-cost ratio and reliability. As new display technologies (mainly Micro-LED) are being developed, OLED's future is uncertain.

Earlier this month we reported that Samsung Display cannot supply enough AMOLED displays to Chinese phone maker Oppo, as SDC's production capacity is fully booked, and Oppo is seeing higher demand than anticipated. In fact some reports say that Oppo is selling more phones in China than Apple.

Now Oppo confirms this shortage of AMOLED display panels for the R9, and the company's president announced that Oppo will release an LCD variant called R9km. The LCD in the R9km will be supplied by JDI. The Oppo R9 (also known as F1 Plus) has a large display (5.5" FHD, 401 PPI) and is now available for around $500 in the US, unlocked.

We are quite used to the fact that all reviews and tests to show that OLED TVs outperform the best LCD and Plasma TVs, but in a recent HDR shootout in the UK, LCD TVs actually were favored by the audience.

The UK HDTVTestweb site pitched several LCD TVs against LG'd 65" OLED65E6 TV. The TV that got the most votes was Samsung's UE65KS9500 (UN6KS9800 in the US), and the runner up was Panasonic's TX-65DX902 (65DX900 in the US). The shootout used several HDR clips.

ETNews posted an interesting story, in which it is said that Chinese display makers are diverting investments away from LCD production and into flexible OLED production. ETNews lists BOE Display, CSoT, TianMa and Visionox - all bringing forward flexible OLED plans.

Flexible OLED prototype, Tianma

Tianma and Visionox, according to ETNews, already started to make actual investment and placed initial equipment orders for flexible OLED production. BOE and CSoT decided to postpone 8-gen LCD investment plans and will start investing in flexible OLEDs by the end of 2016.

IHS says that the OLED display penetration rate in mobile phones will grow from 13% in 2015 to 34% in 2021, mostly due to the adoption of OLEDs by China-based phone makers. For some reason IHS does not mention Apple - but if OLEDs start to appear in iPhone models, it will have a drastic effect on OLED penetration.

IHS says that following the success of OLEDs, the market for LED BLUs in mobile phones will start declining - at about 2.6% per year in the same period.

Bloomberg posted an interesting story regarding LG's entry into the small/medium OLED market. LG's CEO, Han Sang Beom, is quoted saying that LGD intends to expedite its investments towards OLED production.

Han admits that LG Display is a "late comer" to this market (at least compared to Samsung Display) but as OLED is expected to go "mainstream" in the next few years (mostly following Apple's decision to adopt the technology in future iPhones) LGD has got to focus more on OLEDs. Han says that it is "undeniable that flexible OLEDs are now the mega-trend in the mobile segment".

Samsung Display recently appointed a new chief, and reportedly the company is now changing direction to focus more on flexible OLEDs and dispose of some of the loss-making LCD business.

According to a new report from Korea Times, SDC has now decided to separate its OLED and LCD business divisions. During the separation, Samsung also moved employees from the LCD to the OLED division.

The first-generation Apple Watch uses a flexible OLED display, exclusively produced by LG Display. Digitimes now says that Apple is developing a Micro-LED panel to be used in a future Watch - to be released in H2 2017.

Apple acquired Micro-LED developer LuxVuew in May 2014, and according to this report has setup a micro-LED research lab in Taiwan in 2015.

In April 2016, Japan's Semiconductor Energy Laboratory (SEL) and Advanced Film Device announced they have developed a hybrid OLED - reflective LCD display, that can switch between an OLED mode (for dark environments) and reflective LCD mode (for sunlight visibility). Such a display could be very power efficient.

TR-Hybrid in OLED mode

SEL demonstrated a prototype display at SID 2016, and provided more information. SEL calls these displays TR-Hybrid displays (TR means Transmissive OLED and Reflective LC). To create this display, SEL introduced holes into the reflecting electrodes of a reflective LCD, and the OLED layer beneath transmitted light through these holes in OLED mode.

In 2012, Sony demonstrated a new micro-LED based display technology called Crystal-LED. These displays use ultra-fine RGB LEDs to create a self-emitting display. Sony actually demonstrated a prototype 55" Full-HD Crystal-LED TV.

Sony never mentioned this technology again, but last week during the InfoComm trade show, Sony unveiled a large tiled outdoor 9.75 x 2.74 meter 8Kx2K display based on Crystal LED technology (Sony calls this display Canvas Display, or CLEDIS).