We’ve been waiting for large-sized OLED TVs at least since Sony rolled out the cool (but too small) XEL-1 in 2007. Various bigger OLEDs and “breakthroughs” have made the news in the years after that, and now LG says it’s ready to showcase the world’s biggest OLED TV at CES 2012 (which kicks off on January 10).

Sized at 55 inches, the panel has a contrast ratio of 100,000:1 and has been developed by using the Oxide TFT technology, according to LG. The company has been working on bigger OLED devices for quite a while now, for example a super-thin 31-inch model (which was shown last year).

So far, so good, but unfortunately LG says they see the device as a step forward in popularizing the concept of large-sized OLED TVs. In other words, the TV is just a prototype at this point with neither a price tag nor a release date, and we might have to wait years before being able to actually buy one.

Via Engadget

Small OLED screens are being used in millions of devices already (like in Samsung’s Galaxy S phones or Sony’s upcoming portable console Vita), but we’re still waiting for large-sized models to hit the mainstream. It’s been four years since Sony offered the XEL-1 (a mini OLED TV) in stores, but the industry has been innovating on LCD screens, for example with LED backlight or 3D, since.

One of the biggest problems is cost: producing big OLED screens has simply been too expensive so far. But now Japan-based Sumitomo Chemical has reportedly developed a technology that makes it possible to mass-produce large OLED TVs at reasonable prices.

According to Japanese biggest business newspaper The Nikkei, Sumitomo uses macro-molecule materials as the main OEL component instead of low-molecular materials that are being used currently (and cost more to produce). As a result, production costs are said to be reduced by up to 50%.

Sumitomo is ready to set up a production facility for the new materials by the end of this year in Osaka before starting production in early 2012.

The company expects the annual output to be enough for the production of four to five million TVs sized at 40 inches. It will offer the materials to TV makers in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

The CEATEC 2011 exhibition started today in Chiba (just outside of Tokyo), and what I saw was either disappointing (like gear that’s already available in stores) or already widely covered, as most Japanese companies pre-announced almost all novelties (for example, Docomo’s awesome smartphone jackets).

One exception was Mitsubishi’s so-called “Diamond Vision OLED”, a semi-spherical display boasting a diameter of 2.7m. It’s very similar to their huge OLED globe that’s currently on display in Tokyo’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation.

This new model consists of a total of  696 OLED panels, each sized at 32 x 32mm. Sized at 96 x 96mm, the OLEDs forming the aforementioned globe are considerably larger, but the panels share the same pixel pitch (3mm).

Mitsubishi said that the Diamond Vision OLED has a brightness of 1,200cd/m2 and consumes 11.2kW of power. The company plans to commercialize the display for digital signage systems.

Earlier this year, during CES 2011, Sony showcased a prototype of a wearable 3D display that looked much like those virtual reality helmets we’ve been seeing since the 1990s. And today, the company announced that it’s actually ready to start selling the OLED device, dubbed “Personal 3D Viewer”/ HMZ-T1, on November 11 -  in Japan.

The head-mounted display is the first of its kind, according to Sony. It creates the experience of watching 3D (or 2D) pictures on a “movie theater-like virtual screen” that’s equivalent to a 750-inch display, if big S is to be believed.

Here are the main specs:

• two 0.7-inch OLED panels with HD resolution (1,280×720)
• 45-degree horizontal viewing angle / “virtual viewing” distance of 20m for the aforementioned 750-inch virtual screen
• 5.1 surround sound coming from speakers integrated into the HMD (Sony’s Virtualphones)
• processor unit with two HDMI interfaces (input and output) for connecting TVs, consoles or Blu-ray players
• size: 180×168×36mm, weight: 420g

In their press release, Sony isn’t mentioning plans for sales outside Japan, but over here, the HMZ-T1 is expected to carry a $780 price tag.

One of the marquee features of Sony’s new Alpha and NEX cameras, which by the way look excellent, is the new electronic viewfinder. I’ve never been particularly attracted to these things, preferring the mirror-based optical viewfinder on DSLRs or simply the large, bright LCDs on the back of most cameras. But Fujifilm’s X100 (despite its flaws) changed my mind about the usefulness of the EVF, and I’m ready to accept a camera that’s all EVF, all the time. And it helps that Sony’s new screen is a miracle of miniaturization.

Tech-On has obtained some information about the bite-sized OLED panel being used in the new cameras, and seeing the device itself in its tiny glory is a reminder of how advanced our imaging devices have become:

Sony’s previous EVF was 800×600 (I believe) and a traditional LCD. The new one is not only more high-resolution at 1024×768, but it’s an OLED panel instead of backlit LCD, giving it ten times the contrast of its predecessor, according to Sony. The ~2.4 million dots making up the panel are all white diodes with red, green, or blue filters; color diodes are not quite ready for prime time yet.

The display is wholly owned and manufactured by Sony Mobile Display Corp, and it confirms that Sony is deeply into the whole OLED thing. And by combining their display business with Toshiba’s and Hitachi’s, they’re looking like the company to beat for next-generation displays. Right now the world’s most famous displays are probably the iPhone 4 and iPad displays, and if the high-res iPad 3 rumors are correct, that could continue. But the charms of OLEDs are many and various, and Sony knows it. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more impressive tech like this amazing little EVF over the next year or two.

While you would think that “flat” category would include mobile phones, there’s no rule saying the whole thing has to be curvy or flat. A phone design that has the screen curving off around the edge could be really cool. Samsung also wants to put these screens in wristwatches, though it doesn’t look like they’re quite thin enough (with battery and all) to fare well in that space just yet.

I’m more excited about these mass-produced things going into lighting. They can be wrapped around a 1″-diameter cylinder, and I’m sure a lot of designers are excited about the possibilities there.

[via OLED-Display.net]

What’s interesting is that neither one of the companies but a government-backed investment fund will take a major stake in the new entity, which is expected to be established by the end of this year. That fund, Innovation Network Corp. of Japan, will likely control 70-80% of the entity, according to Japanese business daily The Nikkei (the rest will be shared between Sony and Toshiba).

Toshiba Mobile Display and Sony Mobile Display will cease to exist, and the yet to be named entity will compete with Sharp, the Hitachi-Foxconn alliance, and others in the global small LCD panel market.

Another interesting point is that the Sony-Toshiba move is aimed at getting both companies ready for a post-LCD future: the new entity is supposed to streamline all future R&D in OLED technology by the Sony and Toshiba. So far, big S and big T have been developing OLEDs separately, but they are far behind Samsung, the current global leader in that market.

Unfortunately, Toshiba is only making 100 of them, and they’re already reserved for disaster victims. They don’t expect to sell them to consumers, I’m guessing because they’d actually be quite expensive. Bright OLED panel, high-capacity battery pack, solar charging? This ain’t your daddy’s desk lamp.

Too bad, but good for Toshiba. By the way, if you want to donate, you still can.

[via CNET]

If you have a chance to go to the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo this month, do it: Mitsubishi Electric has just installed a 6-meter OLED globe, the world’s first of this size, in one of the halls in the museum. Visitors will be able to see the so-called Geo Cosmos with their own eyes from June 11.

The aluminum sphere consists of a total of 10,362 OLED panels, each sized at 96 x 96mm, and will be hanging 18 from the floor. Mitsubishi used their existing modular Diamond Vision OLED technology to build the globe (the Geo Cosmos that was showcased so far consists of LCDs).

In the museum, Mitsubishi Electric says the Geo Cosmos will be used to display “scenes of clouds and other visions of the earth” taken from a satellite at a resolution of 10 million pixels.

Many of the transparent displays we’re seeing are AMOLEDs; this one is a “PMOLED,” utilizing a passive matrix instead of an active one. It’s similar to the way e-ink works, but still requires power to fluoresce, so don’t go expecting month-long battery life on these things. But for color e-readers the tech could result in some serious power savings.

Will we see this screen on any devices soon? I doubt it. It’s too small for most consumer devices, and AMOLED is more than likely the next generation of small displays. But TDK is a big company and this is just the tip of the iceberg — a photo-ready version of something that has a dozen other variants. We’ll hear about more soon enough.

It’s not the first flexible screen we have covered in recent years, but it’s the first one from Toshiba. The company has developed a 3-inch OLED panel that’s 0.1mm thin and weighs just 1g (pictured). Apart from the size and weight, the main selling point of the OLED is that it can retain picture quality over a long period of time, according to a recent report in The Nikkei (Japan’s biggest business daily).

Toshiba didn’t specify what they mean with “long”, but they did say how they created the display: apparently, the OLED is built by attaching an oxide semiconductor TFT to a plastic substrate at 200 °C (instead of a glass substrate that has to be handled at 320 °C). As a consequence, the new display is 90% lighter than comparable ones using a glass substrate.

Even though the TFTs were handled at a lower temperature than usual, Toshiba claims the display can be used over time without experiencing screen burn-ins, loss in contrast and other problems.

The company hopes to use the new production method for super-thin (and larger) displays than can be rolled up and carried around by 2014 or 2015.

It took Sony just two months to update its TRIMASTER series of (pretty expensive) OLED monitors, and the two new professional displays the company announced [JP] today (a 25-inch model for $7,400 and a 17-incher for $4,900) are more affordable than the first ones (which went for $16,000 and $29,000 respectively).

Here are the main specs:

• full HD resolution, “Super Top Emission” OLED screen with Sony’s 10-bit panel driver
• interfaces: 2x 3G-SDI, HDMI, composite, audio, Ethernet
• aluminum body
• 89 degrees viewing angle
• a 1W mono speaker

This is the smaller model, the PVM-1741 (the 25-incher, the PVM-2541 is picture above):

Mainly targeting TV, advertising and movie production companies, Sony plans to roll out both models in the second half of this year.

A while back there was a crazy company trying to sell space cameras that could take pictures right onto a CPU that also acted as a display. Those people were insane, but this concept device is far from it. Fraunhofer, creators of MP3 technology, have built an OLED chip with built-in video sensor. That means you can take pictures and show pictures at the same time. It basically overlays two matrices over each other, one for transmitting light and one for sensing light.

The chips contain both an active OLED matrix with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels and a therein integrated photodetector (160 x 120 pixels). The combination of both matrices in one chip is an essential possibility for system integrators to design smaller devices that make use of both functionalities.

You could feasibly use these in see-through displays or more exotic scanning/display systems. Don’t expect it soon, though. This stuff is still monochrome and it’s not going to get commercialized for a while.

via Slashgear via oled-info

It has become a bit quiet about OLED lately (apart from the NGP announcement), but today Sony announced [JP] not one but two so-called TRIMASTER EL master monitors with an OLED display. There will be a 25-inch (BVM-E250) and a 17-inch model (BVM-E170), specifically aimed at TV and movie production companies.

Sony says these monitors are based on their XEL-1 OLED mini TV and are the first of their kind.

Here are the main specs for both models:

• full HD 1080p OLED screen
• aluminum body
• Ethernet
• HDMI, DisplayPort, SD-SDI, 3G-SDI, and HD-SDI ports

Sony will start offering the big model in Japan on May 1 ($29,000) and follow with the smaller one on July 1 ($16,000).

Patently Apple has a good summary of the patents, which are mostly technical (having to do with coatings, implementation of touch layers, and so on), so I won’t go into detail here. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the iPhone 5 goes OLED. The challenge is keeping that resolution, which is already at the edge of what’s possible with displays that size.

Who knows, that last 0.2mm could be the difference that makes a breakthrough device possible. Hopefully not literally breakthrough, though.

The technical advances that made this possible took its inspiration from Taiwanese crepes, of all things: ITRI included a sort of non-stick layer that allows… man, I don’t even know. Now I just want a crepe.

[via TG Daily]

One of the highlights of this year’s CEATEC (a technology exhibition that took place in Japan earlier this month and which we covered extensively) was TDK’s booth. The company showed two prototypes of passive matrix mini OLED panels, one of which is transparent and the other flexible (like the one Sony showed earlier this year).

I took two videos at the exhibition, but this new one, released today by our friends over at Diginfonews in Tokyo, is well worth watching, too.

The see-through OLED features 220 ppi quality with QVGA resolution, is sized at 2-inches and boasts a transmittance of 50-60%. In the video embedded below, a TDK representative says his company hopes to eventually boost the number to 80%. The film-type OLED is less than 0.3 mm thick, bendable (up to a radius of curvature of 25 mm), and ultra-light (0.05g/cm2).

What’s even better is that the TDK employee says his company plans to actually start mass-producing both OLEDs as early as next year. Here’s the (pretty impressive) video:

A pleasant surprise at this year’s CEATEC: TDK’s two passive matrix mini OLED panels, one of which is transparent and the other bendable (like the one Sony showed earlier this year). What’s cool is that both prototypes are showcased as black-and-white and color models.

You can see both displays in action in the videos I took at the exhibition below.

The flexible type is just 0.3mm thin and sized at 3.5 inches. Apparently, TDK plans to start mass-producing this panel as early next year. Its picture quality wasn’t really as high as you’d want it to be, but there is still time for improvements.

The panel with the bigger wow-factor, the see-through type, was really cool. It has a transmittance of about 50% and features QVGA resolution – which is OK, at a screen size of about 2 inches. I want one, but I am not sure why exactly screens (of any size) would have to be transparent.

Here are the panels in action:
http://blip.tv/play/hMQ5goH0BAA%2Em4v

Here’s another video:
http://blip.tv/play/hMQ5goH0aQA%2Em4v

Just when everyone thought OLED screens would constitute the third of innovation for flat panel TVs (following LED backlit TVs and 3D capability), Toshiba just made a surprise decision. According to Japanese business daily The Nikkei, Toshiba has entirely given up previous plans to mass-produce OLED screens.

Toshiba’s subsidiary, Toshiba Mobile Display Corp., together with Panasonic, has invested $190 million in 2008 to set up an OLED production line at a factory in Ishikawa prefecture. The plan was to produce 1.5 million OLED screens for smartphones per year. But that won’t happen (on the picture, you can see a bigger OLED Toshiba showed two years ago).

Toshiba says its decision to scrap OLED was triggered by a surge in demand for LCD this year. Apparently, another important factor was the blow the recent financial crisis dealt to the earnings of the company.

All staff involved in the production and R&D of OLED will be transferred to the LCD panel division. The company will now focus on doing OLED-related R&D for lighting equipment only.

Of course, this development in lighting technology will take a while to come to market, but the future does look bright indeed.