March 2014

Last month Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S5 with its 5.1" FHD (432 PPI) Super AMOLED display. The phone is set to launch globally on April 11th, but my friend Raymond Soneira from DisplayMate received a GS5 from Samsung to test the display. And his conclusions? The GS5's display is a major improvement over the GS4 display. In fact, the GS5's AMOLED is the best mobile display ever tested at DisplayMate, outperforming all other OLED and LCD displays.

But just how is the display better than the 5" Full-HD one on the GS4 and every other mobile display on the market? DisplayMate says that the new display is features the highest brightness, the lowest reflectance, the highest color accuracy, the highest contrast rating in ambient light and the smallest brightness variation with viewing angle. That's quite impressive!

Researchers from Kyushu University (led by Chihaya Adachi) developed a highly efficient blue OLED TADF (Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence) emitter that achieves almost 20% external quantum efficiency - similar to the best blue phosphorescent emitters.

TADF OLEDs are free from the heavy metals used in phosphorescent emitters and so they could be cheaper and better for the environment. The main problem with blue phosphorescent OLEDs is the short lifetime which still makes it impossible to use them in commercial applications. The new TADF blue OLEDs has about the same lifetime as the blue PHOLEDs, but researchers are hopeful that it will be easier to improve the lifetime of the TADF emitters.

Yesterday Philips officially announced their latest OLED panel, the Lumiblade Brite FL300. Today German design studio design studio Emdedesign (owned by Thomas Emde) announced a new OLED brand called OMLED that use Philips' upcoming panels.

OMLED launched a wide range of OLED luminaries, all using Philips' new FL300 panels. OMLED launched dozens of lamps in four categories: Pendant lights, floor lamps, desk lamps and table lamps. The designs all look pretty similar. OMLED has an online shop and they detail the prices of this lamps which range from €750 (for a table lamp with a single OLED panel) to €2,850 (a chandelier with 5 OLED panels). The lamps will be available in September 2014.

A few days ago Pioneer and Mitsubishi Chemical announced that they began to mass produce OLED lighting modules made with a "wet coating system". The two Japanese companies estimated that the new process will reduce the cost of the OLED panel by 90% compared to the current production method.

Today I found this nice video showing two new OLED luminaries (the Wireframe and the Magic Tiles Nine) designed by Ely Rozenberg and Mauro Del Santo. This project was organized by Pioneer, Mitsubishi and +ISO and those are apparently the first lamps to use Pioneer's new printed OLED panels.

Panasonic is reportedly going to withdraw from the OLED lighting market. The Japanese company cannot see earnings coming from this operation due to the high cost of production. Panasonic Idemitsu OLED lighting (PIOL, established in 2011 with Idemitsu Kosan) will be dissolved. Panasonic will turn all of its focus into LED lighting.

This is sad news and a bit of surprise as only a few weeks ago Panasonic demonstrated three new OLED lighting panels at a LED trade show in Tokyo, including the company's first flexible OLEDs. On the other hand, In December 2013 Panasonic also canceled their OLED TV joint development with Sony. So perhaps it makes sense for Panasonic to withdraw from OLEDs altogether.

Philips officially announced their latest OLED panel, the Lumiblade Brite FL300. This 12x12 cm (10x10 cm active area) new panel is very bright - up to 300 lumens. The FL300 is quite efficient (over 50 lm/W) and comes in either 3000K or 4000K.

This panel uses thin-film encapsulation and is only 1.4 mm thick. The lifetime is 10,000 hours (LT70) at full brightness and 50,000 hours at 125 lumens. The CRI is over 80.

In December 2013 Skyworth announced its first OLED TV, and now the company announced it finally started to mass produce the TV. The Tianchi E980 is a 55" curved Full-HD OLED TV that supports Skyworth's Tianchi 4 OS offering smart capabilities. The E980 uses LG Display's WRGB OLED panel.

Interestingly, when Skyworth announced the E980 and E990 OLED TVs back in December 2013, the TVs were flat (see photo below). But it seems the company finally adopted a curved design. You can see LG's OLED branding displayed on the panel of the E980 below.

Last month Huawei unveiled their TalkBand B1 smart wearable device. It was reported that the display is a 1.4" white flexible (curved) OLED. It wasn't clear who the maker of this display was, and whether it is actually flexible.

Now Huawei posted the full specification of the TalkBand, and it turns out that the display is indeed a curved OLED. It is a 1.4" 128x16 PMOLED panel made by Futaba. This is Futaba's film OLED, and it's probably the first device to use those curved (flexible) panels. Towards the end of 2013, Futaba indeed said they finished development of those panels. In any case, Huawei reveals that the panel is only 0.3 mm thick and it weighs only 1 gram.

Picodeon developed its its ultra-short pulsed laser deposition (USPLD) surface coating technology to be able to coat OLED encapsulation layers on plastic substrates at low temperatures. The company's systems can be used to create either porous or dense aluminium oxide (Al2O3) coatings (also other metallic and oxide coatings).

Picodeon's Al2O3 coatings can be applied on polyethylene (PE) and thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) polymer film substrates. Picodeon’s recently released ColdAb Series4 equipment (shown above) is currently being installed in commercial applications.

In August 2013, Visionox said they developed a 3.5" monochrome flexible AMOLED. Now the company announced that they developed a full-color 3.5" flexible AMOLED based on an LTPS backplane.

The panel is 3.5" inch in size (active area), 22 ?m thick and weighs less than 0.2 grams. The bending radius is less than 5 mm. Visionox said they developed several technologies to enable this panel, including a high transmittance transparent cathode, a new flexible thin encapsulation and an efficient top emission OLED device structure. The company says that they expect to "transfer these technologies directly to industrialization in the future".