DisplaySearch: Sony’s OLED TV lifespan rated at 17,000 hours

In a new report released Wednesday on the characterization of AMOLED display technology, DisplaySearch addressed the Sony XEL-1 TV and the technology’s sub-pixel architecture, micro cavity, and compensation circuits.

The report includes measurements of lifetime by color and image, power consumption differential aging, burn-in, contrast ratio and luminance. DisplaySearch also addresses the system architecture as well as the organic material, including thicknesses.

The RGB architecture is very sensitive to the image and has a 5,000 hour lifetime for white and a 17,000 hour lifetime for the typical video image, well below the published specifications of Sony, the report concludes. Moreover the panel suffers from differential aging: After 1,000 hours the blue luminance degraded by 12 percent, the red by 7 percent and the green by 8 percent.

Sony, for their part, claim the TV has 30K hours half lifetime.