Competing technologies - Page 6

Market research company Omdia says that at the end of 2020, 62.8% of all smartphones use OLED panels, while 31.8%, use LCDs (I'm not sure about the rest of the smartphones, maybe some use E Ink displays but not all the rest of the missing 5.4% in Omdia's summary.

Omdia further estimates that SDC's smartphone OLED panel sales will exceed $5 billion in Q1 2021, a 30% increase over Q1 2020.

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BOE has unveiled a new display, a 55" 4K quantum-dots panel, which it calls AMQLED (active-matrix Quantum Dot LED) display. This display uses electroluminescent QD technology - which is similar to OLEDs but with QD emitters. BOE says the display achieves a color gamut of up to 119% NTSC, and a contrast ratio of 1000000:1.

The reports claims that BOE launched this as a commercial product, but the details are not clear. This technology has been under development for many years, but it hasn't reached the performance required by commercial products, so this is a bit puzzling, hopefully we'll learn more soon.

According to UBI Research from Korea, Samsung Display has managed to improve its quantum dots nanorod LED (QNED) technology, and the company aims to start buying production equipment next year.

Apparently SDC's plan is to replace the fluorescent blue emitters in its QD-OLED TV production process, which will of course turn these TV panels into QD-QNED ones.

LG Display announced that its OLED TV panels have received Eco-Product certification from Swiss-based SGS (Société Générale de Surveillance). LG's OLED TV panels have been recognized as eco-friendly products with low emissions of hazardous substances.

SGS evaluated the overall environmental aspects of OLED TV panels and found their environmental friendliness to be especially notable in three categories covering the lowering of indoor air pollutants, the reduction of hazardous substances, and high recyclability.

DSCC says that the high costs of microLED production will limit the adoption of microLED TVs, which are highly expensive, and the technology will remain in the niche of ultra large displays. The market is set to grow from around $25 million in 2020 to $228 million by 2026.

Just for comparison, six years after being commercialization, in 2019 OLED TV revenues were estimated at $2.5 billion.

Market research company DSCC updates its WOLED TV production cost estimates and forecasts. DSCC says that LG is improving the production at its 8.5-Gen production line in Guangzhou and by next year the cost of production in China will be lower than comparable production in Korea - by about 15%. One meaningful technology adopted in China is MMG which enables around 20% cost reduction.

DSCC also estimates that while MiniLED TVs are cheaper to produce compared to OLEDs, the gap is less than 10%, which means that retail prices of MiniLEDs will be pretty much the same as the retail prices of OLED TVs.

MicroLED technology is regarded by many as a highly promising display technology, that could rival OLED in many applications in the future. We have been following microLEDs since 2018 via MicroLED-Info and are indeed excited by the progress and potential of this display technology.

Peak EQE of RGB micro-LED as a function of LED chip size (source: Crystals)

One of the most talked-about advantages of microLED displays compared to OLEDs is the power efficiency. MicroLEDs are based on in-organic LEDs, which are inherently much more efficient than organic LEDs.

Taiwan-based Innolux demonstrated several new display technologies that will enable the company to compete against OLED displays. First up we have this 55" rollable mini-LED display prototype. This is an emissive mini-LED display, it is not a mini-LED backlit LCD display.

Innolux did not disclose any specifications on this display (not even the resolution), but it did say that the display use a flexible PCB and features "high curvature, high brightness, high contrast, high saturation and high definition dynamic picture". Innolux says that rollable OLEDs face challenges of reliability and cost and this technology could prove to succeed where rollable OLEDs cannot.

In 2019 Hisense announced that it developed a new LCD display technology which uses two LCD panels to improve the display's contrast. The company now launched its first such TV, the 65SX Dual-Cell LCD TV.

Hisense says that the 65SX TV will ship in Australia next month (September 2020), for $3,499 AUD (around $2,500 USD).