Kaneka announced that it will start accepting orders for OLED lighting panels on March 22nd, 2011 in Japan (and later in April in Europe). Kaneka will offer OLED square panels in five colors (warm white, red, orange, blue and green). The panels will be dimmable (in the range from 1,000cd/m² to 5,000cd/m²).

Kaneka's OLED panels will cost around ¥2 million (approx $24,000) per square meter - and the company believes that the price will drop to ¥200,000 ($2,400) next year and to ¥50,000 ($600) or less by 2020. Production capacity in 2011 will be 10,000m² - and this will grow to 100,000m² in 2015. Kaneka panels will not be very efficient - around 20lm/W and will offer around 10,000 hours lifetime. But the company plans to improve this to about 60lm/W and 25,000 by 2014.

Kaneka is developing OLED Lighting panels, and have announced a competition - to design a lighting object to be set up in bars. Kaneka will present a bar space (designed by the architect Mr. Koichi Suzuno) based on the 'Attractive bars in Japan' theme in the MilanoSalone 2011 exhibition. This bar venue will be using designs from the competition.

The first prize is one million yen (about $12,000) and an invitation to the exhibition. There are also 3 runner up prizes. You can send your designs by January 10th.

Japan's Kaneka say that their OLED Lighting panels are ready to be shipped. If someone places an order, they can be mass produced. Kaneka has been working on OLED Lighting since April 2008, and originally planned to have a 3-year research project. They now say they decided to commercialize the technology even before the research project is finished.

Kaneka offers three OLED panels. The first is a daylight color panel (6000K) with a maximum brightness of 5,000cd/m² and a lifetime of 15,000 hours (when the initial brightness is 1,000cd/m²). The second panel has a warm-white (3000K), 5,000cd/m² maximum brightness and a lifetime of 10,000 hours. The third panel is red with 2,000cd/m² max brightness and lifetime of 5,000 hours.