Samsung

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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 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.

Electronista reports that Sprint's first Wimax (4G) phone will be the HTC Supersonic. It's a hign-end Android 2.1 phone with a 4.3" OLED, 1Ghz processor and a 5 mp camera. If this is true, than this is the largest AMOLED display on any phone. The 4G network will enable 3-6Mbps speeds. The phone will be ready in the first half of 2010. 

Sprint's WiMAX covers only 27 cities in the US with major cities such as Boston, New York and San Francisco to get covered later this year.

Samsung are going to push the new Wave phone (with the Super AMOLED and Bada OS) - it will be available in 50 countries by May and Samsung will offer developer support in 20 countries. They hope to get at least 1000 Bada apps by the end of 2010, and expects to sell around 10 million Wave phones in 2010. 

Samsung Wave s8500

"We want to push feature phones into the mass market, and get feature phone users into smartphones." says Samsung. Bada is important to Samsung, but they are pursuing a multi-platform strategy, and they are not diverting resources from competing handset platforms such as Android.

Via TotalTelecom