Widening horizons for OLED televisions

Dan Rogers - 29 Apr 2010

The OLED television market is touted as one of the most lucrative for the organic and plastic electronics industry. Brilliant, vibrant and extremely thin displays that can be produced at a fraction of the cost of LCDs have been a source of much of the coverage of organic electronics.

While backing from leading consumer electronics brands like Samsung and Sony suggested that the age of the OLED television was approaching a few years ago, it seems that was something of a false dawn. The first commercial OLED television, the XEL-1 from Sony, offered a meagre 11-inch display for a hefty ¥200,000 (€1,637) price tag when it was launched in December 2007. Meanwhile, Samsung's investment in AMOLED production has translated only into smaller consumer electronics items, in particular some of its new smartphones.

Yet the recent announcement by LG that it would be scaling up OLED displays from 15 inches (unveiled in November 2009 in South Korea) to 30 inches and higher by 2012 is a bold statement that the lucrative television market may not be beyond the capabilities of OLEDs after all.

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This article appears in full in Volume 2, issue 6 of +Plastic Electronics magazine, including comments from Barry Young, MD of the OLED Association, and Cambridge Display Technology's CEO David Fyfe about LG's purchase of Kodak's OLED business and Samsung's new OLED factory.

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