Canon

CNet published an interesting interview with Chuck Westfall, technical adviser for Canon's professional products marketing division. They discuss why OLEDs aren't available in any Canon product yet.

Chuck says that OLEDs indeed offer high-quality images and lower power consumption, but Canon does not want to rely on other companies manufacturing ability. They are making around 30M cameras (compact and SLRs) each year - so they need quite a bit of capacity...

After a long legal battle (over 3 years), patens in the SED TV case have been settled, and now Canon can launch their SED TVs. SED TVs are said to have a beautiful picure and viewing angle, but are as thin as an LCD or PDP display.

Canon is yet to mass-produce those kind of TVs (up until now they only produced prototypes). In fact Canon's president said they will not launch SED TVs immediatly - in fact because of the recent slump in TV prices, Canon will have a hard time introducing an expensive new TV.

Via Financial Times

There were rumors that the new Canon EOS 50D camera will have an OLED display.

Canon officially announced the camera today, and unfortunatly the display is a 3" TFT LCD, and not an OLED...

Read more info about the EOS 50D here (dpreview).

There are some rumors across the web that Canon will release two new SLR cameras (5D Mark II and EOS-50) with 3" 'high-res' OLED displays. These might be revealed at the Photokina trade show (September).

More 'details' of the cameras here (DPReview)

Hitachi and Canon have agreed to jointly develop and manufacture small and midsize (2.5"-3") OLED displays for digital cameras within two years, it was learned Saturday. The two firms will transfer a total of about 100 engineers to a new organization they plan to set up in early July to handle the project.

They also intend to build a new production line at an existing plant in Chiba Prefecture to turn out organic EL displays on a trial basis. Based on the results, the two partners expect to build a system to mass-produce the EL displays at relatively low cost, taking advantage of Canon's materials coating technology and production control know-how.

In an interview with C|Net, Canon's "digital camera guru" made some interesting remarks about OLEDs -

Canon has been involved in a patent dispute with U.S.- based Nano-Proprietary Inc., which prevented the Japanese company from putting SED flat-panel televisions on the market in 2007 as originally planned, the newspaper said today.