A Walk Down Memory Lane - Q4 2025: OLED History from 20, 10, and 5 Years Ago

We are happy to announce a new article series, in which we look back 20, 10, and 5 years ago, and revisit the history of the OLED industry. We hope this will be fun, and also informative - by reflecting on the past, we can better understand how far the industry has come and where it is headed. Last month we posted the first such article, and now we have decided to launch a quarterly series.

20 years ago - Q4 2005

Back in 2005, Samsung SDI was the company's subsidiary in charge of OLED display production - and it was still PMOLEDs. In October 2025, the company announced that its cumulative shipments of PMOLED panels have exceeded 30 million units since mass production began in August 2002. Samsung SDI was building a new PMOLED fab in the southern port city of Busan with a monthly production capacity of 3.5 million units. Samsung began producing AMOLED displays two years later, in 2007, and indeed in November 2005 it already announced its first AMOLED investment - a $485 million production line. 

An interesting announcement was made by Canon in October 2005, as the company aimed to enter the TV panel market, working on three different technologies: SED, OLED and projection displays. OLED production at Canon never saw the light of day. Canon's Tokki subsidiary, though, is still the leader in OLED evaporation equipment. SED technology, in simple terms, used a panel made from many small CRT chambers, each representing a sub-pixel. It was developed by several companies, but finally abandoned at around 2010 as it could not compete with LCDs.