Samsung OLED

11/17/2008

Samsung is one of the leaders in OLED screens research and production. OLED Displays are thinner, more efficient and offer better picture quality than LCD or Plasma displays.

Samsung are confident that OLED displays is the best future technology. In fact Samsung claims that by 2014, 50" of cell phones might have AMOLED displays.

Samsung OLED Research

Samsung has an extensive OLED research program. Currently they are making Small AMOLED panels, but they are also working on making larger panels. They have licenced IP from UDC, in order to make their display more efficient.

Samsung are also working on Flexible and Transparent OLEDs. They have shown a really thin OLED display, that actually flaps in the wind. They also showed an OLED 'window' - with a transparent display embedded inside. In October 2009 they have also demoed a 2" (176x200) transparent OLED panel:

Samsung 2-inch transparent OLED prototype

In October 2009 Samsung unveiled a new 30" OLED TV prototype that supports 3D images.

Samsung 30-inch 3D AMOLED TV prototype

Samsung AMOLED production

Samsung is the number one producer of AMOLED panels, making over a million displays a month - currently sizes are around 2" to 4". You can see Samsung's panels in Mobile phones, A/V players and other devices.

In June 2008 Samsung committed over 500M$ for OLED production, the largest investment in OLEDs yet. Samsung plans to double their production in 2009, and double it again in 2010.

Samsung are currently making over 2 million panels a month, working 24h in thier 4G plant which has achieved 90% yield.

Samsung mobile devices with OLEDs

Samsung is the using AMOLEDs in many of their gadgets - in fact they are the leading company with regard to OLED adoption. They have already several OLED phones out there, including the new A877, the Omnia HD (with a large 3.7" AMOLED, the Show Projection Phone, the S8300 ulta touch and others. Samsung also has two OLED cameras - the NV24HD and the TL320.

Samsung OLED TV plans

In June 2009 Samsung has revealed two new OLED TV Panels, 14.1" and 31". They are both "ready for production", and we can assume Samsung will start to produce them yet.

Samsung 31-inch OLED HDTV

In October 2008 Samsung showed a large 40" AMOLED High Definition (HDTV). They do not have a release date yet, but it's clear that these are the kind of TVs Samsung wishes to make with OLED.

Samsung OLED laptop

Samsung has been playing around with the idea of an OLED laptop for quite some time. They now say that they will have one ready by Q3 2010. In October 2009, Samsung showed 2 OLED laptop prototypes (one with a small 7" panel, and the other with a 14" one).

Samsung 7-inch OLED laptop prototype

Latest stories about Samsung OLEDs:

Samsung shows new transparent AMOLED "Digital Window"

03/08/2010

Samsung are showing a new transparent AMOLED called "Digital Window" at CeBIT:

Samsung Transparent AMOLED digital window photo

We don't have any information on this yet. It seems to be about the same size as the 14" transparent OLED laptop they had at CES. We know that Samsung are seriously into transparent AMOLEDs so it's always good to see more such displays...

Via AVING

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Bundesdruckerei shows ePassport with Samsung's flexible AMOLED

03/08/2010

Remember Samsung's flexible OLED for ID cards or passports? Bundesdruckerei is showing their e-passport that uses that AMOLED display at CeBIT. It still says "future product", but it seems to get getting closer to production every time we see it.

Bundesdruckerei ePassport with AMOLED photo

The display is a flexible 2" QVGA (240x320), 260K color OLED with a 10,000:1 contrast ratio. It is very low on power, and actually uses the RF power from the contactless reader - there's no battery at all here.

Bundesdruckerei ePassport with AMOLED closeup photo

OLEDNet published their OLED market forecast for 2010-2016

03/04/2010

OLEDNet has published an OLED market forecast for 2010-2016. Basically the say that during 2010, Samsung will introduce 5" and 7" AMOLEDs, and LG Display will produce 2.7" AMOLED for digital cameras, 3.5" WVGA for mobile phones and 4.3" OLEDs for portable TVS. Toshiba Mobile Displays (TMD) will begin AMOLED small panel production during 2010 as well.

Toshiba, Matsushita and Hitachi are all expected to introduce 20"-40" OLED TV panels as early as 2011. AUO will begin mass production in 2011, too.

Via OLEDNet

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Samsung: Full-size OLED TVs are on the horizon

03/03/2010

Samsung Mobile Display's president of engineering Brian Berkeley said yesterday that Samsung is accelerating its development of OLED displays, including increasing the size and volume to enable rollout of OLED TVs. Samsung has been critical of OLED TVs in the past years, but things are changing: there's high volume AMOLED production, with millions of OLED displays for mobile devices shipping each month.

Samsung 30-inch 3D OLED TV prototype

Samsung are now making huge investments in OLEDs, including development of medium to large sized panels. They are actually working on how to scale a Gen 4 sized plants (like they have today) to a Gen 7 or even a Gen 8, which will be able to make TV panels economically. This will require either much more powerful lasers working much more quickly than today's process for creating the backplane on which they deposit the OLEDs, or some alternative technology. There are also issues in color patterning, for which Samsung thinks it has a new unique solution, and OLED printing.

Berkeley predicts that a 40" OLED TV will use only 10 watts in about five years (compared to 40 watts today for a 40" LCD). He also said that the technology will be great for 3D TVs (image switching is quicker and so left and right images are completely separated).

The Nexus One's OLED gets an in-depth technical check, turns out very bad

02/23/2010

The DisplayBlog and DisplayMate are working on an interesting series of tests for Google's Nexus One phone AMOLED display and the iPhone's 3GS display. It's not finished yet, but they have posted the first tests of the AMOLED display. There's a lot of technical information, but here are the main conclusions:

The OLED is 800x480, but uses PenTile technology, that has two-thirds of the total number of sub-pixels found on an 800x480 LCD, so it won’t be quite as sharp as a typical 800x480 display.
The display has only 16-bits color depth, with just 32 or 64 intensity levels. DisplayMate say this is unacceptable for a high performance phone such as the Nexus One. The colors are coarse and inaccurate as a result.
The display is excellent for text, icons and menu graphics, but poor for image and awful for resolution scaling. The problem with resolution scaling lies in the Android OS which uses a "laughably primitive scaling algorithm".
The peak white brightness is just 229 cd/m2 which is rather poor.
The black brightness is outstanding (0.0035 cd/m2) - so dark it is hard to measure or even detect.
The contrast ratio (65416) is great, the highest they have measured for a production display.
The screen reflectance is relatively high and washes out the image, makes it hard to view in bright conditions.
The phone uses Dynamic Color and Dynamic Contrast which results is exaggerated colors and stretching of images.