OLED ink jet printing: introduction and market status - Page 2

A new report from China suggests that TCL CSOT is gearing up to start producing inkjet printed smartphone OLED panels in September. TCL brands these panels as Real OLEDs as they contain a full RGB subpixel structure. It is said that the first products to utilize these new displays are Xiaomi's 16 Pro and Redmi K90 Pro smartphones.

The reports says that these new panels will offer a 2K resolution, or 2048 x 1080 (which is actually a downgrade from the Xiaomi 15 Pro resolution). If we assume a 6.7" display size, this translates to a PPI of 345. Last month CSOT demonstrated 326 PPI inkjet printed smartphone panels.

The UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council  (EPSRC) has awarded 2.9 million GBP (around $3.9 million USD) to a research group at the University of St Andrews led by Prof. Eli Zysman-Colman, to develop solution-processable stable and efficient blue OLED emitters, based on Prof. Zysman-Colman TADF OLED emitters research.

The research group will establish a 5-year open fellowship, that will form a team of 6 researchers. The final objective is to develop an automated film formation and characterization platform. While the grant is academic, this technology may end up being commercialized by SolOLED. 

TCL CSOT is demonstrating its latest display technologies at SID Displayweek 2025. The company's main focus seems to be on inkjet printed OLED displays, and the company showed several new such displays, as it gears up towards mass production.

First up is a smartphone IJP OLED panel, which TCL says is the world's first. The 6.5-inch display offers a resolution of 824x1833 (326 PPI), with a real RGB structure. This is an impressive display, achieving very high density for an inkjet printing process.

Notion Systems is proud to present the n.jet EHD printing system featuring Scrona's latest GEN3 EHD technology at the opening of SCRONA’s Taiwan Application Lab in Kaohsiung. The MEMS-based multi-nozzle EHD printheads are now available for feasibility testing and application development for customers in Taiwan and the Asia-Pacific region.

A big thank you to the Taiwan team at Electroninks Incorporated for their warm welcome and excellent support during the installation of the tool. Appreciation also goes out to all the visitors who came to see the system for the first time.

Notion Systems looks forward to establishing new collaborations and bringing this technology to various applications in the Taiwanese and Asian microelectronics supply chain.
 

Inkjet printing developer Notion Systems announced a strategic partnership with the Fraunhofer IAP institute to co-develop EHD printing technologies for the display industry. The initial focus of this partnership is to develop new materials and optimizing printing processes for OLED and QLED printing.

EHD utilizes electric fields to precisely transfer inks or other liquids onto substrates. Standard inkjet printing is limited in the deposition resolution, but HED enables very high precision and very small droplet sizes. 

Poland-based OLED material developer Noctiluca announced that it has signed a joint development agreement (JDA) with a subsidiary of the world’s second-largest TV manufacturer and a leader in display technology from China, focused on industrializing printed OLED technologies. This is likely to be TCL CSoT's Juhua printing subsidiary. TCL CSoT recently started to produced inkjet printed OLEDs.

Noctiluca and TCL CSoT will work together to adopt Noctiluca's proprietary chemical compound into TCL's OLED displays. The company does not detail what kind of materials will be tested in this agreement. The company develops both TADF/HF OLED emitters and also EIL materials for blue OLED emission.

TCL CSoT announced several times in the past that it plans to start producing OLED display using an inkjet printing process by the end of 2024, and yesterday it officially announced it has started mass producing printed OLED displays at its 5.5-Gen production line.

The company brands these displays as APEX OLED displays. In fact it seems as if all of TCL displays (OLEDs and LCDs both) will be branded as APEX OLEDs, with the slogan PACE to APEX.

A few months ago Inuru started shipping its range of OLED-powered stickers, or "holo tags" as the company refers to them. These are battery-powered flexible stickers that can be used for laptops or any other use.

The company was kind enough to send us three stickers, from their latest Cyberpunk range. These stickers cost around 20 Euros, and there are many alternative designs. The idea is that the flexible stickers include a small OLED, a battery and a button that lights up the OLED for a few seconds. The whole device is said to be waterproof, but I did not test it.

Inuru says that the lifetime of the OLED is about 5,000 hours. As the battery is limited, though, they say that each sticker is limited at around 2,500 clicks. Some of them use a red OLED, and some a blue one.

TCL CSoT has announced several times in the past that it plans to start producing OLED display using an inkjet printing process by the end of 2024, and a new report from Korea updates the latest status from the company.

TCL CSoT originally said it will produce OLED TV panels, but later updated its plans to produce IT displays. According to the Elec, the company has decided that its first panel to be produced is a 21.6" monitor displays for medical devices. The company has unveiled this panel in SID 2024 - it has a 4K resolution and a peak brightness of 350 nits. 

OLED TVs offer excellent image quality, outperforming LCDs with superb contrast, excellent and vivid color reproduction and fast refresh rates. In addition, OLEDs enable thin and efficient TVs. OLED TV production has been increasing up until a year ago, reaching a potential capacity of around 10 million units. This is impressive, but considering the entire global TV market that amounts to around 250 million units, OLEDs represent only around 2.5% of the total market (it is important to note that OLEDs tend to be produced in large sizes and carry a much higher average selling price compared to LCDs).

But OLED TV production capacity growth has declined in recent years. In this article we will shortly detail the history of OLED TV production, and look at potential paths towards increased penetration in the future. More details and into the future of OLED technologies and OLED TVs is included in the OLED Toolbox.

A bit of history: in 2013, both Samsung and LGD started producing OLED TV panels. Samsung chose the straightforward RGB side-by-side architecture, in which there are three sub-pixels, with red, green and blue OLED emitters. LG chose its own WRGB (or WOLED) architecture (the IP was acquired from Kodak in 2009) which uses four white OLED subpixels (made from yellow and blue OLED subpixels). Both companies released 55" FHD OLED TVs, priced at over $10,000 per unit. It soon became clear that Samsung's approach was not scalable, while LGD managed to enter mass production quickly and reduce prices dramatically within a few years to compete with the dominant LCD TV technology.