Following Australia and California, it seems that the EU is also considering banning power hungry TVs - large Plasma ones, to be exact.
The EU proposed standards are less stringent than those proposed in California. It's quite possible that in future years we'll no longer be able to buy those kind of TVs anywhere - which might give power efficient technologies such as OLED TVs a great boost.
The Los Angeles Times reports that the California Energy Commission is looking for ways to relieve the
strain on the power grid. They want to impose energy standards on TVs, starting in 2011.
The regulations are expected to pass in mid-2009, although there is opposition from the industry, of course.
Televisions account for about 10% of the average Californian's monthly household electricity bill.
Earlier this year we reported about similar regulations proposals in Australia.
I think the state should also encourage people to buy power-efficient TVs, not just discourage them from buying power-hungry ones. A tax credit for efficient TVs, for example, might be very effective. Anyway this might be good news for OLED TVs - they will be very efficient, when they finally arrive.
Researchers and Engineers at Florida University are working on OLED white light, funded by the US Department of Energy. They have successfully built a blue OLED with a 50lm/w efficiency.
The final target for the project is 100lm/w.
What Hi-Fi has spoken to Samsung's VP of Flat-Panel development, who says LCDs will 'hold off OLEDs for many years'. HS Kim says that OLEDs are pricier, and people will not pay more for such TVs. Also LCDs are advancing quickly in areas such as power consumption, so this isn't good news for OLED either.
On the plus side, HS Kim says Samsung can already make 50" OLED TVs, and may show them at CES.
This comes only a few days after Samsung said we'll see OLED laptops in 2010 and that OLEDs are going to be 'mainstream' soon.
Out take? First of all Samsung is a big company with many units, so it's fair that not everyone thinks the same. Samsung is commited to Mobile OLEDs - for phones, PDAs and laptops. These panels are smaller (up to 15" for laptops), and the power efficiency is important for mobile devices. However in the TV market, things are more difficult...
Sony says that they are 'investing heavily' in OLEDs - but only on OLED TVs. They are not interested in making smaller sized OLED displays. They say OLEDs have great performance, and are energy saving, too.
Hodogaya Chemical and Novaled have agreed to offer hole transport materials (HTM) for Novaled PIN-OLED structures. Hodogaya has exclusively developed specific HTM for Novaled fitting very well with the Novaled PIN OLED structures. As a first result Novaled is enhancing its material offer with an additional hole transport material called NHT18.
The new NHT18 has a similar behavior in OLEDs like NPB, but provides additional advantages to OLED manufacturers. For example, the Tg of NHT18 is above 130C and thus gives a high temperature stability in OLED devices. The current efficiency in today's fluorescent blue emitting PIN OLEDs is 10% higher.
A research group of the Dresden Technical University (together with Novaled) has achieved record energy consumption for OLEDs. The achievement brings the organic LED technology closer to industrial volume production, and these OLEDs are prototyped at the Fraunhofer ITMS.
The research team achieved an efficiency of 26, 22 and 3.1 percent for red, green and blue organic LEDs which combined form a white light source. The low efficiency for blue results of physical differences â while red and green OLEDs are phosphorescent light sources, their blue counterpart is a fluorescent one, resulting in lower light emission. The difference, however, can be compensated for by increasing the active size of the blue light emitter as well as sending a higher current through it, explained research group member Rico Meerheim.
Eastman Kodak today announced the introduction of a highly
Our friend at the DisplayBlog, Jin, has written an interesting view on OLEDs. Basically he says that by the time OLEDs are available (around 2010, hopefully) LCD/PDP TVs might have better contrast, be just as thin and with the same color gamut - and obviously they will be cheaper when OLEDs first arrive. In fact he thinks that a 30" OLED will cost about as much as a 60" LCD - and he's probably right at that - I'm not sure however that everyone will want such huge TVs!
My take is a bit different. First of all, I believe that OLEDs will improve at a faster rate than LCD/PDP. It's true that much more money is invested in the older, more proven techs, but being a new technology OLEDs can enjoy a much faster rate of improvement (it's always like that with new tech).
Osram is giving some more information about their OLED lamp the Early Future at the CEATEC 2008 exhibition.
The OLED panels have a lifetime of 5,000 hours (up from 2,000), and OSRAM says that these lamps will be available by 2011 or 2012. The efficiency is 46 lm/W (1000 cd/m2).
