Panasonic announced that it will stop all LCD panel production by 2021. Panasonic already stopped producing LCD TV panels in 2016, and current produces LCDs for automotive and industrial markets.
Panasonic says that even though its panels are highly regarded for their quality, the continuation of the business is enviable, as there is a "tougher environment" in the global market.
Panasonic has been showing transparent OLED display prototypes and concepts since 2016, and in April 2019 the company unveiled its latest prototype - a wooden cabinet design:
At IFA 2019 Panasonic says that it aims to launch a transparent OLED display by next year as a commercial product. It is highly likely that this would be some kind of signage/commercial display.
HDTVTest, together with Crampton & Moore, organized the 2019 TV shootout, to find out what's the best TV of 2019. The test included four 65-inch TVs - LG OLED65C9, Panasonic 65GZ2000, Samsung 65Q90R, and Sony's 65A9G. The reference display was Sony's BVM-X300 OLED mastering monitor.
The audience (38 AV enthusiasts) chose LG's OLEDC9 as the best TV of 2019, followed by Panasonic's GZ2000. OLED TVs were the best in all categories, except the bright-room performance, for which Samsung won first place with its high brightness.
OLED is an amazing technology for lighting - it creates beautiful, efficient and healthy light sources. OLED lighting has great promise but unfortunately the high price of production is a challenge that no one has managed to overcome and OLED lighting remains a small niche industry as of 2019.
In the early years, several large lighting makers (including GE, Philips, OSRAM, Panasonic, NEC and others) had active OLED lighting programs, but slowly almost all of these companies dropped out of the market - for various reasons - but the main one being that the large investments in large scale production are not certified to lead to market adoption and the competition with LED lighting is extremely difficult.
In April 2019 Panasonic unveiled a transparent OLED TV prototype housed in a wooden cabinet. Here's a nice video showing the display in action:
Panasonic has been showing transparent OLED display prototypes and concepts since 2016. This specific prototype was designed by Scandinavian based designer Daniel Rybakken in collaboration with Panasonic Design Kyoto.
According to Business Korea, the demand for OLED TVs is increasing, which is helping OLED TV vendors, mainly LG, Sony and Panasonic to increase sales in the premium TV segment.
BK says that in 2018, LG Electronics sold 62.2% of all OLED TVs, followed by Sony (18.9%) and Panasonic (7.7%). Other OLED TV vendors include AOC/Tp-Vision/Philips (5.7%) and Skyworth (2.4%).
Panasonic has been showing transparent OLED display prototypes and concepts since 2016 (with the latest one shown last year in Shanghai) and today the Japanese TV maker has demonstrated a new transparent concept OLED display.
The new display, designed by Scandinavian based designer Daniel Rybakken in collaboration with Panasonic Design Kyoto uses a transparent OLED panel housed in a wooden cabinet that looks like a regular glass cabinet.
Panasonic officially announced its complete 2019 OLED TV lineup - which includes four TVs. All of Panasonic's 2019 TVs are available in 55" and 65" and feature Panasonic's "ultra-powerful" HCX PRO Intelligent processor, HDR, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, HLG, HLG photo and are fine tuned by Hollywood colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld.
The four models are the GZ950, GZ1000, GZ1500 and GZ2000. The GZ950 is the "entry-level" model, while the the GZ2000 is Panasonic's flagship TV which offers an "extremely high image quality and color accuracy" and very high end audio. Interestingly the GZ2000 uses a "bespoke Professional Edition 4K OLED panel exclusively customized by Panasonic R&D engineers". The panels are WRGB AMOLEDs made by LGD.
According to its plans, LG Display aims to ship around 2.9 million OLED TV panels in 2018, and the Korean panel maker expects that its production capacity expansion will allow it to ship around 4 million panels in 2019.
LGD's largest customer is LG Electronics, but the company is also enjoying strong sales to Japanese TV makers. The Nikkei Asian Review says that in 2018 the company will ship 500,000 panels to Sony and 200,000 to Panasonic, and next year it expects to increase its shipments to Sony to 850,000 units and to Panasonic to 300,000 units. LG Electronics OLED TV market share will be around 50-60% in 2019.
Panasonic is demonstrating a new transparent OLED TV "Smart Glass" prototype at the China International Import Expo tradeshow in Shanghai. We do not have any specification of this panel.
In September 2017 Panasonic demonstrated a 55" 4K transparent OLED, this could be the same display but we are not sure. We do not know who's the producer of the panel itself, but it is likely to be LG Display.
