March 2021

A few days ago we reported that LG Electronics is getting ready to launch its 65" rollable OLED TV, the 65RX OLED TV globally. And now the rollable TV is available to pre-order in the UK. The price is £99,999 - or around $137,000. This is higher than the price is Korea, which is around $87,000. If LG manages to find customers, it will ship the TV form Korea.

LG started shipping the TV in Korea in October 2020. Last month it was reported that LG sold only 10 units.

Tianma unveiled a new OLED display technology, which it refers to as CFOT OLED. This new foldable AMOLED display improves over the company's previous design with a lowered power consumption. The new displays are also thinner than before. The company demonstrated a 8.3-inch CFOT OLED:

We do not know much about this new technology. But from the performance boost and the CF part of the name, it is likely that this is a polarizer-free OLED that adopts color-filters instead to remove reflections.

LG Display announced that its OLED TV panels obtained a 'Discomfort Glare Free' verification from UL, a leading global safety science company. LGD says that this is the first display ever to be recognized as a display that emits no glare.

UL’s testing is based on the Unified Glare Rating (UGR), a glare assessment recognized by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE). The verification mark is issued only when the UGR is 22 or less when watching TV between 70 lux (lx), which is about the brightness of a bedroom floor lamp, and 300 lux (lx), which is equivalent to the light from a bright window.

Korea-based OLED materials maker Solus Advanced Materials (previously Doosan Solus, which was spun-off from DEM in 2019) announced that it will setup a $20.5 million OLED materials fab in Changzhou, Jiangsu province in China.

The new factory will be modeled after the company's existing Iksan (South Korea) fab and iwll produce the same high quality OLED materials. It will start operations by the end of 2022, and by 2025 it will have a capacity of 20 metric tonnes.

Samsung Display has been developing polarizer-free AMOLED displays for many years, and last year UBI detailed how the company plans to use color filters to eliminate the need for polarizers and so increase the efficiency of their OLED panels while also lowering the thickness.

DSCC posted an interested article that details Samsung's upcoming polarizer-free OLEDs, which it brands as POL-LESS OLEDs. The first OLEDs to adopt this new structure are expected to be adopted in Samsung's Galaxy Fold 3 later this year.

UBI Research estimates that Ultra-Thin Glass (UTG) will hold a 80% market share in the foldable OLED panel cover material market. The rest of the market will adopt Polyimide films.

According to UBI, Samsung Display will only use UTG in its future foldable OLED displays. Transparent Polyimide films will be used in budget models, or for displays larger than 10" in size. BOE and CSoT currently use Polyimide films in foldable OLEDs, but both companies are looking to adopt UTG in future displays.

OLED driver IC developer MagnaChip announced that it is being acquired by China-based Wise Road Capital, for $1.4 billion. This price is about 75% higher than Magnachip's three-month average share price. The deal still needs regulatory approval in the United States.

In recent years Magnachip reported increased AMOLED driver sales and accelerated its driver R&D. Last month the company announced that it has started to mass produce its first OLED driver ICs for 120Hz QHD smartphone flexible OLED displays.

JOLED announced that it has started to mass produce OLEDs at its new 5.5-Gen production line in Nomi, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. JOLED brands its new displays as OLEDIO displays. JOLED plans to produce 10- to 32-inch displays, targeting applications such as high-end monitors, automotive displays and medical monitors.

JOLED also branded its production technology, based on ink-jet printing, as TRIPRINT.

A few months ago Mercedes announced that its upcoming EQS electric vehicle will adopt a large curved front display, 56-inch in size, called the MBUX Hyperscreen. Today the company unveiled the interior cabin of the EQS:

The display is actually made from three different OLED units, embedded in a single glass display. There's a central 17.7-inch panel plus two 12.3-inch panels. The 56-inch glass also includes holes for the air-vents which are integrated into the display. The whole AI-enabled system is powered by 8 CPU cores and 24 GB of RAM.

In 2020 it was reported that Samsung Electronics is set to use AMOLED displays produced by China's BOE in some of its smartphones. It was later reported that BOE failed to pass Samsung's quality tests.

According to a new report from Korea, BOE finally managed to pass Samsung's tests and is set to start supplying flexible OLEDs that will be used in Samsung's budget Galaxy M series of smartphones.