Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) technology has been the star at electronics fairs this year. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sony made the largest product introduction ever with an OLED display. Sony’s new 11″ TV is called the “XEL-1”. Sony’s HDTV is extremely thin (less than 1/10″) and lightweight. At the FPD International Show in Asia in November, Samsung introduced a 31″ OLED HDTV with 1080P resolution and 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio.
Companies like LG, Toshiba, Matsushita (Panasonic) are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the development of this promising technology. Toshiba plans to ship a 30″ OLED display in 2009. Samsung says it will ship large-screen OLED equipment in 2010.
Eastman-Kodak holds several patents in OLED technology. Manufacturers will likely have to pay a license fee to Kodak for each OLED TV sold. Eastman-Kodak has just introduced the EK-GD403 OLED material, which uses green dopant technology. Technological advancement is a stampede.
There is a lot of money to be made. According to DisplaySearch, in 2007, the LCD TV market was estimated at $27.4 billion, while the plasma TV market was estimated at $7.5 billion. A cost-competitive OLED TV would likely get a significant share of this market. DisplaySearch estimates that the OLED market will grow to over $17 billion annually by 2015. According to iSuppli, the current market for OLED devices is just over $500 million per year. Samsung currently has a 70% market share. But cost and technology issues have prevented OLED from being used in larger equipment, such as HDTVs or computer monitors.
Easy-to-wall-mount HDTV
Most consumers say they want an HDTV that can be mounted on the wall. However, according to NPD Group, a consumer and retail market research information firm (NPD.com), only 13 percent of current LCD TV owners and 25 percent of plasma TV owners say that your TV is mounted on the wall.
“Consumers are drawn to flat-panel display technologies for their wall-mounting capabilities, but the difficulty of such an installation often leads them to explore alternatives such as mounts or retail installations.” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis, The NPD Group. But with OLED, the job of mounting the hardware would be much easier, more like hanging a picture on the wall. The hardware weighs a fraction of LCD or plasma.
OLED performance
OLED screens have already been used for some time in digital cameras, mobile phones and other devices with relatively small panels, because they are very energy efficient, which is very important in portable devices.
A significant advantage of OLED displays over traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) is that OLED displays do not require a backlight to function. Due to this, they consume much less energy. And because there’s no backlight, an OLED screen is much thinner than an LCD screen.
And because there’s no backlight, an OLED system has a larger viewing angle than an LED system, and an OLED screen can be much thinner than an LCD screen.
OLED’s response time is faster than normal LCD screens. An average of 8 to 12 milliseconds in response time is normal for an LCD compared to 0.01 milliseconds in response time for an OLED. This means that OLED will be less subject to “blur”. Blur occurs when there is fast-moving programming, such as sports. When the image changes rapidly, the pixels may lag in response.
One of the problems that has limited the use of OLEDs was that blue OLED technology had a short lifetime, but a new type of blue LED, “PHOLED”, has a lifetime of 20,000 hours (20-25 years of life). normal TV use). This was a breakthrough in the effort to commercialize this technology for the HDTV market.
In theory, OLED screens can be made more efficiently than LCD or plasma screens, which means they shouldn’t be as expensive. The Sony XEL-1 sells for $2500, but you have to remember that the first large LCD and plasma screens were much more expensive when they were first introduced. If production costs can be reduced, OLED HDTV equipment will eventually become less expensive than comparable LCD equipment.
Advantages of OLED performance:
- Energy efficiency
- Very thin and light, 1/4″ or less
- Better brightness than LCD
- Wide viewing angle (~160 degree viewing angle)
- Excellent contrast (> 1,000,000:1)
- Once developed, the manufacturing process must be inexpensive (the process is similar to inkjet printing)
- Very large screens (>100 inches) are possible
- Response is better than LCD (good for fast moving images like Sports)
If OLED doesn’t live up to its promise, it won’t be the first HDTV display to do so. Remember the surface conduction electron emitter (SED TV) screen? Toshiba and Canon were ready to go into production, but patent disputes with a company called Nano-Proprietary killed the technology. That probably won’t happen this time. The main obstacle will be the manufacturing process. If the units can be manufactured cost competitively with LCD and plasma, it should be very interesting.