My first meeting at SID was with Universal Display's Janice Mahon. UDC had some pretty interesting updates for us at SID, and some nice exhibits in the booth as well - only OLED lighting panels, but quite interesting ones. This post will be rather long...
First of all, the company announced advances in evaporated OLED materials. The advances are mostly in the OLED efficiency, which was improved for all colors. Lifetime was improved slightly, but the light blue still offers only 20,000 hours lifetime (LT50). You can compare to the PHOLED specifications from 2011 here.
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Comments
Remember that UDC is not a luminaire maker. These are just samples and prototypes used to advance the technology and demonstrate it...
Sure but as I said the reason I was not all that impressed by their booth was not the design of the samples and prototypes as such. The reason was that I didn't really see a major breakthrough. With the exception of the bezel free panel (that looked really nice but had next to no light output even compared to other OLEDs) the concepts they showed have been around for quite some time and while there was undoutedly quite a bit of improvement compared to the last years, the prototypes they showed were still not nearly bright enough to light anything and even more importantly clearly still had major lifetime issues.
Let me put it that way: It was a really nice booth, but I don't really think that they showed a major breakthrough or a gamechanger with respect to OLED Lighting. Because of this from my point of view it was nice but maybe not as impressive as in the article.
The improvement of the technology is step by step, or it is a long time and gradual process. Otherwise, it will be a revolution.
During this process, there are always quite of barriers. However, most of them could be overcome by scientists with enough time passing. Just be patient.........@_@
As someone who is working in the lighting industry I have to say that I was not really all that impressed with the UDC booth. Sure most of the stuff looked nice (except for the flexible 'luminaire' which I have to say looked downright ugly to me), but the light output was nowhere near what you need for general illumination and they very obviously still have problems with angular color dispersion (even though they used that nicely in one of their concept luminaires at the booth).
The bezel-free panel looked nice, but at the light output shown I do not see how it can be used for anything but purely artistic lighting. Now if they can show that this concept also works for higher luminances and efficiencies, then we might be talking.
Of more interest were the numbers that they presented at the symposium, because those showed that they are still improving in efficiency and lifetime and while they are still not their this at least gives hope for the future.