Canon announced today that they will acquire Tokki Corporation- and make it a wholly owned subsidiary. Tokki plans to foster and expand the OLED and solar-battery manufacturing equipment business.
Tokki has developed their first OLED mass-production system back in 1999. In March 2007 we have interviewed Tokki's overseas sales manager.
Canon has officially abandoned the SED TV technology - they just couldn't bring the cost down to make this a viable alternative to LCD TVs. Canon still plans to use SED panels for industrial and medical displays (high margin businesses).
CNet published an interesting interview with Chuck Westfall, technical adviser for Canon's professional products
marketing division. They discuss why OLEDs aren't available in any Canon product yet.
Chuck says that OLEDs indeed offer high-quality images and lower power consumption, but Canon does not want to rely on other companies manufacturing ability. They are making around 30M cameras (compact and SLRs) each year - so they need quite a bit of capacity...
After a long legal battle (over 3 years), patens in the SED TV case have been settled, and now Canon can launch their SED TVs. SED TVs are said to have a beautiful picure and viewing angle, but are as thin as an LCD or PDP display.
Canon is yet to mass-produce those kind of TVs (up until now they only produced prototypes). In fact Canon's president said they will not launch SED TVs immediatly - in fact because of the recent slump in TV prices, Canon will have a hard time introducing an expensive new TV.
There were rumors that the new Canon EOS 50D camera will have an OLED display.
Canon officially announced the camera today, and unfortunatly the display is a 3" TFT LCD, and not an OLED...
Read more info about the EOS 50D here (dpreview).
There are some rumors across the web that Canon will release two new SLR cameras (5D Mark II and EOS-50) with 3" 'high-res' OLED displays. These might be revealed at the Photokina trade show (September).
More 'details' of the cameras here (DPReview)
Hitachi and Canon have agreed to jointly develop and manufacture small and midsize (2.5"-3") OLED displays for digital cameras within two years, it was learned Saturday. The two firms will transfer a total of about 100 engineers to a new organization they plan to set up in early July to handle the project.
They also intend to build a new production line at an existing plant in Chiba Prefecture to turn out organic EL displays on a trial basis. Based on the results, the two partners expect to build a system to mass-produce the EL displays at relatively low cost, taking advantage of Canon's materials coating technology and production control know-how.
Hitachi and Canon (and Matsushita/Panasonic) announced plans to work together in December 2007, and there were also rumors that Panasonic will make 37" OLED TVs by 2011 in the JV plant.
In an interview with C|Net, Canon's "digital camera guru" made some interesting remarks about OLEDs -
"It was demonstrably brighter, had better color accuracy, and lower power consumption." We're looking to implement OLED in all our consumer products: digital still cameras, camcorders, and inkjet printers.
Canon Inc. plans to develop surface-conduction electron-emitter display, or SED, televisions using its own technology, the Asahi newspaper reported, without saying where it obtained the information. Canon has been involved in a patent dispute with U.S.- based Nano-Proprietary Inc., which prevented the Japanese company from putting SED flat-panel televisions on the market in 2007 as originally planned, the newspaper said today.
The company has started the development of a new electron- emitting technology that should be more stable than Nano- Proprietary's, the Asahi said. Canon now aims to mass produce the televisions, according to the report.
Hitachi may scale down or exit its liquid crystal display (LCD) panel operations on the back of a deal with Matsushita Electric Industrial and Canon, the Nikkei business daily reported.
The firms have agreed to a tie-up on organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels, a competing display technology, by which Matsushita and Canon would each invest more than 100 billion yen ($880 million) to take minority stakes in unit Hitachi Displays Ltd, it said.
