27-inch OLED TV 'fairly soon'

Sony plans to launch a much larger version of its impressive OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) television within the next year, CEO Howard Stringer said Wednesday. Sony launched its first OLED TV, an 11-inch model, in late 2007. The set, which also has the distinction of being the first commercial OLED TV in the world, won great acclaim thanks to the smoother, sharper and more richly colored images it offered over today's LCD (liquid crystal display) and PDP (plasma display panel) technologies. At the same time Sony began showing a prototype 27-inch OLED screen and last month in Tokyo showed an OLED screen that was just 0.3 millimeters thick. Stringer, speaking at The Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference in Carlsbad, California, on Wednesday, introduced the thin prototype and talked about commercialization. Full article here: PC World

A laymans view on OLED TV

Modern tech life teems with long-standing dilemmas, questions that never seem to go away. Mac or Windows? Turn off the computer every night or let it sleep? Plasma or LCD? Or why not OLED?

At a cooperative Best Buy store, I did a little test. I set the XEL-1 up next to state-of-the-art plasmas and LCD sets, all hooked up to the same video signal for easy comparison, and recorded the reactions of shoppers and employees. Their adjectives for this picture included "astonishing," "astounding," "incredible" (twice) and "amazing" (five times). They were right. The XEL-1's picture is so colorful, vibrant, rich, lifelike and high in contrast, you catch your breath. It's like looking out a window. With the glass missing. Name a drawback of plasma or LCD -- motion blur, uneven lighting across the panel, blacks that aren't quite black, whites that aren't quite white, limited viewing angle, color that isn't quite true, brightness that washes out in bright rooms, screen-door effect up close -- and this TV overcomes it. Full article here: journalnow.com

Dribbling over a non-Sony OLED TV?

Samsung showed off a 40" OLED TV at CES in January, however it's taken until now for them to announce they'll be available commercially as of 2009. They've supposedly started producing the panels already - 1.5 million of them - however that number will reach 3 million in 2009, and 6 million in 2010. If they enter the market next year with OLED panels, they'll be joining Sony who managed to pip everyone to the post with their XEL-1.OLED screens are looking like the Next Big Thing in the world of consumer electronics, due to their wider viewing angles, faster response times, better contrast and colours, and of course - the fact that they're so darned skinny! Full article here: TechDigest

Sony Reveals Another Paper Thin OLED TV

Sony has cut the thickness of their LED OLED panel to a mere 0.3mm or 0.1 inches. The new TV was shown for the first time at the Display 2008 expo trade show held in Japan. At the CES Expo in Las Vegas in January Sony stunned crowds with the commercial release 11-inch XEL-1, the world's first mass-produced OLED TV. The new display panel which measures just 0.3mm thick (0.01in) is a major reduction and could go commercial as early as December 2008. Full artcile here: Smarthouse

OLED to Show Rapid Growth This Year

According to DisplaySearch, Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) displays will grow 69 per cent this year to reach more than US$826.5 million, and are expected to continue to grow to achieve an impressive US$3.1 billion by 2012. The research company, which is a division of The NPD Group, predicts an 83 per cent growth in the category in 2009, following by 53 per cent in 2010 as Active Matrix OLEDs become mainstream products. Full artcile here: Marketnews

Why Toshiba Dropped OLED TV

Investigation by engineers of the Sony 11” OLED offering has revealed that power is still a major issue and could well affect the roll-out of any future OLED screened as governments world-wide move to bring in rating systems for all TV technology including Plasma, LCD, DLP and OLED. Full article here: Smarthouse

Digital Journal TV First Look: Organic LED and the Future of Television

In this episode Digital Journal TV will give you a first look at Sony's 11-inch XEL-1 and discuss the pros and cons of this emerging TV technology. There is a long list of benefits but we've also found a few setbacks, and we look into just how much Sony plans to invest in the future of television. Source: Digital Journal

Analysis of Sony's OLED TV Reveals Design Innovations

The XEL-1 organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TV released by Sony Corp of Japan in December 2007 has a display only 3mm thick. In addition to its innovative design, another key selling point is the display performance. We measured and evaluated the display performance with the help of a panel engineer, and came to understand the difficulties that Sony faced in overcoming the drawbacks associated with using OLED panels in TVs, and how it made the best use of the superlative image quality that OLED panels offer.

Extending Service Life
The most intriguing of the difficulties Sony faced was brightness time control. It turns out that after the TV is turned on, the brightness is automatically adjusted through five levels in only 300s (Fig 1). This appears to be a clever way of utilizing still-developing OLED panels.



Full article here: Nikkei Electronics Asia

Hitachi to launch slimline Wooo TV (range only 38mm wide)

Following on from Sony’s launch of the 8mm thick XEL-1 OLED TV in Japan, Hitachi has thrown down the gauntlet in Europe by announcing the imminent arrival of its so-called Wooo range of slimline TVs.

Well, Hitachi isn’t actually going to describe any of the models in its new range specifically as a TV, as none of them feature an on-board TV tuner. Quite what it will call them isn’t yet clear. However, with a suitable set-top box and an HDMI cable, they are all perfectly able to function as TVs.

Space saving mission

The omission of a tuner is just one of many space-saving and size-reducing measures taken by Hitachi. The on-board power supply has been downsized by 33 per cent too, a move that allows for a much thinner screen overall. Full article here: Techradar

OLEDs: Past, present and future

First appearing in 1999, the OLED display was expected to be the wunderkind of the flat-panel display world, the LCD killer that would quickly take over across a range of applications. Pundits cautioned, however, that it might take OLED technology until 2002 or even 2003 to scale up to 10 inches.

Flash forward nine years to 2008, and only one 10-inch-plus OLED has made it to production—and that only in relatively small quantities, with the manufacturer reportedly losing money on every one. Otherwise, the OLED has yet to progress beyond a few small-screen applications. What happened? And now that Sony Corp. has started testing the market with an 11-inch OLED TV, what's next?

Two reasons are most often cited for the OLED's failure to meet expectations. The first is that the LCD, ever a moving target, continued its relentless drive to better performance for lower cost, and passive OLEDs became less attractive. The second is that active-matrix OLEDs (AMOLEDs) present manufacturing challenges in the active-matrix circuitry, in the display materials and structures, and in the interaction between the circuitry and display. Given the advances in active-matrix LCDs, the investment required to iron out the wrinkles in AMOLEDs and achieve reasonable manufacturing yield just didn't seem worth it. Full article here: EE Times