A couple of days ago we reported on an interesting story at Forbes that speculates that Sony may announce an OLED TV lineup at CES 2017, using LGD's panels. Forbes now posted a second article with more details on Sony's OLED TV plans - provided by Barry Young from the OLED Association.

Sony 56-inch OLED TV Prototype, 2014

According to Barry, Sony plans to launch two models - a 55" one and 65" one - and both will support 4K. LGD will start supplying Sony with panels in Q2 2016, and Sony will start shipping those TVs in Q3 or Q4 of 2017.

LG Display teamed up with Ron Arad and Zinoo Park to create new art installations that "highlight the positive aspects of OLED lighting panels".

The video above shows the new installations exhibited at the London Design Festival that took place last month. The video also shows LG Display's flexible OLED lighting panels.

Update: It turns out that this specific $61 million deal is not for an OLED fab, but for BOE Display's upcoming Gen-10.5 LCD fab.

Israel-based inspection solutions provider Orbotech announced it signed an agreement to supply inspection and testing solutions for China's BOE Display upcoming OLED TV fab. The deal is estimated at $61 million, and is Orbotech's largest deal in China so far.

Those inspection systems will be deployed at BOE Display's upcoming 8.5-Gen pilot line in Hefei. According to earlier reports, this fab will produce WRGB OLEDs on an IGZO backplane. According to Orbotec, the facility will produce 90,000 TV panels per month in 2019, and when it reacehs full-scale production it will have a capacity of 120,000 screens. Orbotech will start delivering machines in the first half of 2017.

According to an interesting story at Forbes, Sony may announce an OLED TV lineup at CES 2017 (in a month's time). The company may have already done so at a private event in the UK, but at CES it will do so (according to the speculation, at least) in public.

Sony 56-inch 4K OLED TV prototype - 2013

Sony will be using panels produced by LGD. Sony is actually producing its own large-size AMOLED panels, but only for its professional monitor range. Sony had a consumer OLED TV program, and used to collaborate with Panasonic on that, but that JV was cancelled in 2013. Since then Sony's TV unit produced and demonstrated several high-end LCDs using innovative technology in an effort to match LG's OLED TV performance.

Around August 2016 we started hearing reports of a tight OLED supply and a shortage of AMOLED panels. Chinese mobile phone maker Oppo, for example, confirmed this shortage of AMOLED display panels for the R9 (also known as F1 Plus), and the company's president announced that Oppo will release an LCD variant called R9km.

According to some new information we have, some countries (including the Netherlands and France, and some parts of the US too) are experience a shortage of replacement OLED screens for Samsung's mobile phones. This is true for Samsung's most popular devices - and for both rigid (glass-based) and flexible OLED screens.

Researchers at Tohoku University in Japan developed a super flexible organic liquid crystal device, which they say are promising for next-generation highly-flexible LCD displays. The new device is formed from ultra-thin plastic (polyimide) substrates that are firmly bonded by polymer wall spacers.

The transparent polyimide substrate (made by Mitsui Chemicals) are about 10 um thick each, and feature heat resistance and the ability to form fine pixel structures, including transparent electrodes and color filters. The refractive index anisotropy is extremely small, making wide viewing angles and high contrast ratio possible.

UBI Research is seeing increasing demand for OLED in smartphones - especially for flexible OLEDs. The market analysts at UBI estimate that the market share of OLED technologies in the smartphone display market will rise from 16% to over 62% in 2016.

UBI sees most investments in OLED capacity increase in the future going into flexible OLEDs - and by 2021 flexible OLEDs panels will represent about 70% of the total smartphone display OLED market.

Panasonic announced that it has developed a new IPS LCD panel that achieves a high-contrast ratio of over 1,000,000:1, 600 times better than conventional LCDs. panasonic developed new light modulating cells that permit pixel-by-pixel control of backlight intensity.

Panasonic says that these new displays will be suitable for high-end monitors for broadcasting, video production, medical, automotive, and other fields. The company will start shipping samples in January 2017, produced at the company's 8.5-Gen production lines that are capable of manufacturing 10- to 100-inch products.