OLED-Info: the OLED experts

Researchers at the Fraunhofer FEP institute developed a new wearable OLED-based "button" that can be integrated into textiles. The OLEDs can be designed in any shape, be transparent, dimmable and also patterned. There is also a two-color variant.

The Fraunhofer develops say that such elements can be used for fashion trends, branding, safety applications, light therapy and more. The so-called O-Button is based on an OLED deposited on a wafer-thin foil combined with a microcontroller on a conventional circuit board.

US-based supermarket chain Wegmans Food Markets partnered with OLEDWorks to bring OLED lighting installations to select Wegmans stores and work sites. Wegmans says it wants to test better-quality lighting solutions for its customers and employees.

The Wegmans stores will use Acuity Brands' Peerless OLE4 Oleseence suspended luminaries that combine direct-view OLEDs with LEDs. The first initial tests will take place at Wegmans' Pittsford and Henrietta stores and the company's Rochester headquarters (at employee meeting and dining areas). The HQ installations will use Acuity Brands' Trilia installations and the Petal and Limit from Milwaukee-based Visa Lighting.

Samsung launched a new home screen TV range in India, called Active LED (also "LED for Home") - modular LED-based TV tiles that are offered in 4 sizes (from 110-inch FHD to 260-inch UHD). These are likely to be Micro-LED emissive displays (or mini-LEDs, most likely), even though Samsung did not actually gave any specifications yet.

The Active LEDs are priced from 10 million Rs (around $137,000) for the 110" to 35 million Rs ($480,000) for the 260-inch TV. As these are modular TVs, consumers can choose different shapes (but only one of the four available resolutions/sizes).

Audi officially launched its first electric SUV, the e-tron SUV in San Francisco. As was revealed in the concept e-tron in July, the e-tron uses 7" OLED virtual side mirrors - and external cameras instead of the normal mirrors.

This is not a new concept, but it is great to see Audi adopt this technology in a serially produced car. In 2012 Audi equipped its R18 sports prototype with a 7.7" virtual rear mirror, and later announced it will bring such mirrors to future e-tron cars.

Earlier this month Royole demonstrated its latest technologies at IFA 2018 - including flexible and foldable AMOLED panels, a large automotive display and a phone/bracelet device made from a foldable OLED. The interesting video below shows these new Royole displays.

Royole's flexible OLED displays are produced at the company's "quasi-G6" (5.5-Gen) OLED production fab in Shenzhen which started production in June 2018. In full capacity, Royole's fab will be able to produce over 50 million flexible OLEDs per year (45,000 monthly substrates).

Review web site Rtings.com has performed an extensive burn-in trial for LG's 2017 OLEDC7 OLED TV models, and reports that the TVs have shown signs of permanent image-retention, or burn-in after only 4,000 hours.

Rtings have used six OLED TVs, running them from January 2018 for 5 hours each day at a time followed by one hour when the TVs are turned off. This cycle was run 4 times a day. One TV was at maximum brightness, and the rest at only 200 nits. Some played CNN, some a gaming title (FIFA 2018) and some of the TVs played regular TV channels). The TV with the CNN had a clear logo and static bar burn-in images, and the same goes for the FIFA game (but only slightly). The regular TV programs did not suffer from any burn-in.