Earlier this month, we reported that Taiwan's WiseChip is entering the OLED lighting market with plans to produce candle-light emitting OLEDs using technology developed at Taiwan's National Tsing-Hua University.
Wisechip already started to produce sample panels, and the first ones were setup in an aboriginal village as street lights - embedded inside a bee-hive like mask taken from rotten wood. This tribe, Tai-Yah (also called Atayal), has been without electricty until 1979 (they were known as the "dark tribe"), and currently the use CFL street lights, but rejected a suggestion by the government to install LED lights.
The tribe wanted street lights that will be not only human-friendly, but also ecology-friendly. One of the reasons they rejected the high-brightness LEDs is that they found too many dead insects underneath them. LEDs emit over 3 times more blue light than OLEDs, and blue visible light is widely acknowledge to have harmful effects - and was recently found to attract flying insects.
WiseChip's panels emit light in a vision friendly CT of 1,914K and a high CRI (93). WiseChip aims to start OLED lighting mass production towards the end of 2014 or in early 2015. They say that these OLEDs do not emit high Kelvin blue light which is hazardous to eyes and also carcinogenic.
Professor Jwo-huei Hou from National Tsing-Hua University explains that the blue light emission in both LEDs and OLEDs varies with the color temperature. OLEDs can easily be made with no blue emission. This is more challenging to achieve (if not impossible) with LEDs as they are mainly based on blue LEDs.
