With a laser light engine, colors don’t look so much as if they’re painted on the screen as if they’re shooting out from it. Colors are alive and vibrant in a way that mimics the brightness of neon light, or a large advertising transparency being illuminated from behind in a light box. The company also says that their laser TVs produce twice as many colors as any traditional TV technology. Indeed, many colors on the plasma and especially on the LCD sets were washed out and dull, while their laser counterparts were vibrant, without looking overblown. The picture looks much like a giant version of the images produced by Sony’s superb but tiny OLED HDTV screens.

While Mitsubishi would not talk sizing, pricing, or specs for its LaserVue sets, a casual observation of one of its models indicated that the production version is likely to be about two-thirds as deep as a same-sized DLP rear projection set. That’s still not as thin as an LCD or the really thin OLED TV tech, but it moves toward diminishing the single biggest objection to rear-projection TV.

Mitsubishi Chemical is considering making OLED panels by an ink-jet printing process in order to lower production costs.

The ink-jet process is believed to be more efficient than the existing evaporation coating.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries said on Tuesday that it would start shipping samples of OLED panels this year and may begin mass production if demand is strong. "We have not decided whether we would go for mass production. We will first ship samples and see if there is a market for it," a spokesman for Mitsubishi Heavy said.

He said it would cost about 15 billion yen ($125 million) to build a production line which could produce 20,000 units of panels if the company decides to go for mass production. The Nikkei business newspaper reported on Tuesday that Mitsubishi Heavy will aim for mass production in 2009 and will start making prototypes at its Hiroshima plant as early as this year.

UDC and Mitsubishi Chemical Announce Agreement to Collaborate on Ink Jet Printable OLED Materials Development. The Collaboration is Directed Towards Developing Materials for use in Phosphorescent OLED Displays Fabricated Through Solution or "Wet" Processing Methods.

"Collaborating with a world-class chemical company like Mitsubishi Chemical allows us to share ideas and help each other reach the next level of innovation for OLED materials based on our PHOLED™ phosphorescent OLED technology and Mitsubishi Chemical's expertise in OLED chemicals and ink formulation," said Steven V. Abramson, President and Chief Operating Officer of Universal Display. "Mitsubishi Chemical's commitment to printable phosphorescent OLEDs, which we call P2OLEDs™, indicates that ink jet printable PHOLED technology has real commercial potential. By working in concert on the development of next-generation P2OLED materials with Mitsubishi Chemical, we hope to accelerate this process."

Mitsubishi Chemical has announced that it has developed a solution-based Organic Semiconductor Material, which is expected to open the way to the development of a new class of larger, cheaper flat-panel displays like OLED televisions. Only Pentacene has been reported as a practical small-molecular material having high mobility, but it has to be processed by the high-cost vacuum deposition method.

Polythiophene has been reported as a soluble polymer material, but it can be applied only to a limited area, like electrical papers, because of its low mobility. The newly developed MCRC organic semiconductor material is solution-processible small-molecular material having the high mobility of 1.4cm2/Vs because of its high-crystalline characteristics, according to the company.

This mobility is one of the world's best - equal to amorphous-silicon, the most popular inorganic transistor material. Also, this unique material has potential to be patterned by the laser, different from traditional photolithographic method, which enables high-resolution patterning. MCRC successfully drove an organic light-emitting device (OLED) with the transistors fabricated with its newly developed material. This material has been jointly developed with Professor Noboru Ono of Ehime University, Japan, and the transistor device has been jointly fabricated with Associate Professor Reiji Hattori of Kyushu University, Japan.

Mitsubishi Chemical today announced that it has developed an Organic Light-Emitting Diode device with the highest efficiency in the world in its new blue phosphorescence OLED material.

The new OLED material, which can be produced by a lower-cost, wet-coating process, is expected to open the way to the development of a new class of large flat-panel displays.

The newly developed OLED device employs MCC's own blue phosphorescence host material (wet-coating type), hole blocking material, and hole injection material to optimize the design of a device to achieve the current efficiency of 30 cd/A at the intensity of 100 cd/m2 (external quantum efficiency: 13%), more than twice that of conventional blue wet-coating type OLEDs.

Researchers from Kyoto University together with Mitsubishi Chemical, Pioneer, and Rohm have developed a new bendable OLED display panel.

We do not have a photo of this display, but they did present a monochrome (blue) business card-sized prototype. The researchers say that their technology can be adapted to full-color displays.