LG officially launched its first 4K OLED TV, the 65" 65EC9700 in the US - and it will start shipping in October 2014. The official price is $10,000 - but the real price will be lower. Cleveland Plasma offers it for pre-order for $6,250 for example. The 77" 77EC9800, which will launch in November through "select retailers" has an official price of $25,000.

It's actually weird how way out of touch are LG's official prices for those OLED TVs. The 55EC9300 55" FHD model is still listed as $6,999 while it is being offered for $3,499. The 2013 model (55EA9800) is listed at $8,999 (yes, higher than the new model!) while prices are usually below $3,000.

Updated: it is now confirmed, Apple's Watch uses an AMOLED display!

So Apple did unveil their smartwatch yesterday! The simply called Apple Watch is a square-bodied touch-enabled smart watch, and you can see it below. It comes in three choices of materials (aluminum, stainless steel and 18-karat gold), includes four sensors, changeable straps and requires an iPhone to pair with. The most exciting feature seems to be the "Digital Crown" button navigator.

And the most interesting thing - Apple did not reveal the display type, besides saying that it is a "flexible Retina" display, and that the cover is sapphire. They didn't even detail the resolution or size of the display. To cut a long story short - I believe that Apple did not yet choose whether this is an LCD or an OLED. My explanation below...

Update: According to some sites, this is actually a 4K panel...

Grundig unveiled a new 55" OLED TV prototype at the IFA 2014 trade show. I'm not entirely sure, but it seems to be a 4K panel.

It's highly likely (as was the case with the Panasonic 65" OLED I reported about a couple of hours ago) that the panel maker is LG Display. It will be great to see more makers release OLED TVs, even if there's only one panel supplier. As far as I know Grundig did not say when this TV will be released, but it seems to be a real product, more advanced than Panasonic's TV panel demonstration.

Panasonic unveiled new 65" 4K OLED TV prototypes at the IFA 2014 trade show. These are just concept models (panels in a stand), and the company's director of home entertainment business says Panasonic is waiting for IFA attendees feedback before they decide to release those commercially.

It is rather surprising to see Panasonic show these TVs. Sony and Panasonic halted their OLED TV joint development project in December 2013, and later on Panasonic (with Sony and the INCJ) formed a new company, JOLED, to develop small/medium OLED panels. Panasonic's OLED TV program development was probably halted, or slowed-down at best.

Will OLED lighting save the world? LG Chem seems to think so, or at least they do according to this promotional OLED video they released last month:

Besides being funny (weird?), this video sends out the current marketing message that is being used by several OLED lighting companies - of how OLED lighting provides the most natural light.

In June 2013, Cambridge University and Plastic Logic announced a research collaboration that aimed to develop transparent graphene-based backplanes for flexible displays. Now, following this collaboration, Plastic Logic demonstrated the world's first flexible display that uses a graphene backplane.

The first prototype is a 150 PPI active-matrix E Ink display, in which the electrodes were made from solution-processed graphene (patterned after deposition) in a low-temperature (less than 100 degrees Celsius) process. The UK Technology Strategy Board recently gave a grant towards this research, with an aim to develop full-color OLED displays within the next 12 months.

Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT) had some pretty interesting prototype OLED displays shown at the Touch Taiwan 2014 trade show last month. We do not have any information regarding how close are these prototypes to commercialization.

So first up is a flexible AMOLED display. This panel is 4.8" in size and 720x240 resolution (158 PPI). The company did not reveal any more technical details. The company also showed some simpler flexible PMOLED panels, demonstrating their sealing capabilities by immersing them under water (see image below).

It turns out that Samsung is OLED TV prototypes at their IFA booth, and two of these prototypes feature 4K panels. Those TVs are placed in one of the corners of the booth, and the staff at the booth says that while Samsung did not abandon OLED TVs, the company has no plans to release any OLED TVs "in the near future".

Despite reports to the contrary, we already know that Samsung isn't planning to release any OLED TVs soon. But it's still good to see OLED TVs being shown at trade shows. Samsung first unveiled 4K OLED prototypes at last year's IFA.

This isn't a big surprise, but LG said it will soon stop producing Plasma (PDP) panels, and the company is expected to officially announce this soon. As LG sees OLED TV as the future TV technology, it's likely that more resources will be devoted now to towards OLED TV development.

The other two major PDP makers, Panasonic and Samsung, already stopped producing these panels, leaving China's Changhong as the single plasma producer.

Last month during a trade show, AU Optronics had several AMOLED panel on display, including the 1.63" 320x320 and 5" 720p ones currently in mass production. AUO also showed the 5" 720p flexible AMOLED shown below and a 5.7" WQHD panel.

According to OLEDNET, AUO is now focusing on flexible AMOLEDs, and the company will drive more resources towards developing flexible panels in 2015.