In October 7, LG Display announced that it will soon start mass producing flexible OLEDs. Today we have talked with LG Display officials, and they confirmed that mass production has indeed started. The company currently makes 6" panels that weigh just 7.2 grams are are only 0.44 mm thick (only a third of the thickness of LG's thinnest mobile LCDs).

LGD updates us that the current flexible OLED production capacity in their 4.5-Gen line is 6,000 substrates a month (previously we reported that capacity will be 12,000 substrates). Perhaps the rest of the capacity is dedicated to R&D. In any case 6,000 substrates a month means almost 400,000 6" panels - assuming 100% yields. Of course yields will be lower but it seems that LGD indeed means to produce a fair share of displays and it'll be interesting how they (or other companies) adopt these panels in products.

A few weeks ago we reported that AU Optronics developed a new 65" Oxide-TFT direct-emission OLED panel (the largest OLED panel ever made). Today at SID 2013 AUO discussed this new panel and unveiled the prototype:

AUO says that the panel is Full-HD in resolution, and it uses an "advanced" Oxide-TFT backplane. It was made in a Gen-6 production line which uses the largest Fine Metal Mask (FMM). AUO says that the uniformity of this panel is excellent. AUO also developed new pixel compensation driving technology which is employed in this panel. As can be expected from an OLED panel, AUO reports that their latest OLED features low power consumption, high picture quality, high contrast, high brightness, fast response time and free viewing angles.

SID 2013, the world's most prominent display conference will take place next month (May 19, in Vancouver, Canada) - and they now published some technical papars that will be discussed during the conference. And there's some interesting stuff in there.

First up is AU Optronics paper, describing how the company developed the world's largest OLED panel: a 65" direct-emission Oxide TFT one. This panel, that was produced using an FMM process, features a long-range threshold voltage uniformity of 0.34 V, and the dam and fill encapsulation process is simple and highly stable.

AUO developed a new AMOLED panel that features the world's highest resolution at 443 ppi. The panel is Full-HD and 5" in size (or actually 4.97" if it's 443 ppi). AUO will show prototype panels at China's Display Expo in Shenzhen starting tomorrow. AUO didn't reveal any technical details besides saying that this panel was made using a fine shadow mask process.

AUO previous OLED panel was the 4.65" 1280x720 (317 ppi) shown at October 2012. AUO keeps upgrading their AMOLED densities. But of course what we really want is for AUO to actually start producing AMOLED panels. Some reports suggest that AUO's yields are still very low (around 40%) and the company won't stat mass production until 2014.

CES 2013 was exciting - what with the new OLED TVs and Flexible OLED prototypes and launches. Barry Young from the OLED Association, one of the world's top OLED experts, gave us his views on the new OLED developments from Samsung, Sony, LG and Panasonic. Thanks Barry!

Sony and Panasonic both showed 4K2K 56" OLED TVs, with some parts jointly developed. How close are these two companies to actual mass production?

According to Digitimes, Samsung's upcoming "next-gen" AMOLED panels will use a new pixel layout. Reportedly, Samsung are developing hexagon and diamond shaped pixels. This means that Samsung will increase the resolution but the picture will suffer due to jagged pixel artifacts and blurring. It's probably that at such high pixel density this won't actually be noticed, but still.

In the Galaxy Note II Samsung introduced a new sub-pixel scheme, an RGB matrix in which the blue subpixel is twice as large as the red and green ones - which achieved 267 PPI. Obviously the new 4.99" Full-HD displays have a much higher PPI (440). I assumed Samsung will use the same PenTile arrangement used in most of their AMOLED displays.

Samsung has officially launched their YOUM flexible OLED technology. While the YOUM brand was shown back in April 2012, it is now officially the name of Samsung's plastic-based flexible OLED panel products. The company didn't reveal any new technical details, nor did they say when they'll start shipping products based on those panels (or ship panels to other customers) - but it seems that they are getting closer and closer to mass production. Personally I think we'll still have to wait a year (at least) for them to overcome all technical issues with production.

While we don't have any interesting facts to tell here, we do have some cool videos - showing a bendable panel and also devices that use curved YOUM displays. One of those devices (shown below) has a 5" curved YOUM panel.

Last week we reported that Samsung decided to use OLED technology in its upcoming Full-HD mobile phone display, and today we hear that Samsung plans to unveil this panel at CES 2013 (January 8-11). The panel's size is 4.99" which means 441 PPI (at 1920x1080). Back in October it was reported that Samsung managed to reach 400 PPI using a modified FMM technology.

A 4.99" display is quite larger than the S3 (4.8") and it's not clear whether this will be used in the upcoming S4 phone (I think there's a limit to the size of Samsung's main flagship smartphone). The Note II has a 5.5" display, so the new panel is somewhat between those two phones. Samsung may be able to put this larger display into a case with the same as as the S3 one, by narrowing the bezel and perhaps removing the home button.

A couple of weeks ago we heard reports that Samsung will abandon AMOLED technology in favor of LCD for their next generation flagship phone because they want to have a Full-HD display and they cannot achieve this resolution with OLEDs. New reports from Korea suggest that Samsung Electronics decided to stick with OLEDs. Samsung Display is apparently certain it will be able to produce such high-resolution OLED displays using a modified FMM process.

This is of course great news for Samsung Display and the OLED industry. Obviously we'll have to wait and see whether Samsung actually managed to mass production displays using the new technology. Otherwise Samsung Electronics will have to delay their new flagship phone and this will be a major setback for the company.

Korean site MK news reports that Samsung have plans to produce Full-HD AMOLED panels in the first half of 2012. These panels will feature a pixel density of 400 ppi or even more. Just to compare, the highest PPI AMOLED ever made is the one used in Samsung's own Galaxy Nexus (316 ppi: 4.65", 1280x720, with PenTile technology). The S3 has 306 ppi( 4.8" 1280x720, PenTile) and the Note II has only 267 ppi, 5.5" 1280x720 - but without PenTile.

Back in July it was reported that Samsung managed to reach 350 ppi using FMM (Fine Metal Mask) technology. Perhaps they are getting close to commercialize this specific technology (and also increase the resolution even further to 400 ppi).