Sony, Samsung push OLED to consumer segment

OLEDs will soon break in the consumer market as Sony Corp. and Samsung SDI are making moves to bring the displays to a larger commercial audience.

Sony will launch an 11-inch ultrathin flat TV with an organic LED display in Japan in December. The model is purported to be the first TV to employ OLED technology and will vie for a share of an $82 billion market dominated by LCD and plasma panels. Meanwhile Samsung SDI is set to announce its intention to produce the world’s first 3-inch WVGA (480 x 800) active-matrix (AM) OLED panel, using PenTile subpixel rendering technology from Clairvoyante Inc.

Sony’s OLED TV is touted to be a commercial breakthrough. The technology’s characteristics of energy efficiency, thin size and light weight amount to a crisp picture that Sony said is now suitable for showing fast-moving images from sports events and action movies.

"I want the world’s first OLED TV to be the symbol of the revival of Sony’s technological prowess. I want this to be the flag under which we charge forward to turn our fortunes around," Sony president Ryoji Chubachi said at a news conference at the company’s headquarters, in Tokyo.

Size matters
But size is still a limitation for OLED technology.

"It seems like it is more about technological leadership than something that can actually have an impact on the TV market," said Paul Semenza, VP for displays at market research firm iSuppli Corp. He said Sony caused a stir at the International Consumer Electronics Show in January when it showed an OLED prototype display, "which is truly stunning. But in 2007, 11 inches is not a TV; it is a mobile device."

Sony, the world’s second-largest maker of LCD TVs (behind Samsung), expects the 11-inch OLED TV to sell for $1,700—almost as high as retail prices of some of its own 40-inch LCD models.

Large-OLED-panel manufacturing is difficult, which limits OLED’s appeal as a common display for next-generation TVs. LCD panels dominate, and TV makers are showing LCD and plasma prototypes with much larger panels than OLEDs have achieved to date. Matsushita is even offering 103-inch plasma TVs, while LCD TV makers are offering 40-inch sets, moving up from the predominant 30-inch models.

"I don’t think OLED TVs will replace LCD TVs overnight. But I do believe this is a type of technology with very high potential, something that will come after LCD TVs," Sony executive deputy president Katsumi Ihara told reporters at the Tokyo announcement. Ihara added that he set the price tag of about $1,700 without paying much attention to profitability, suggesting perhaps that Sony is willing to take a loss on each set it sells, at least initially.

OLED TV limitations
In addition, the set’s life span of about 30,000 hours of viewing is roughly half that of Sony’s LCD TVs, but long enough to allow eight hours of daily use for 10 years, according to the company. Sony will limit monthly production to 2,000 units, compared with its plans to sell 10 million units of LCD TVs in the year through next March.

"The price is obviously an issue, and the fact that they might not be making a profit on a $1,700 11-inch display says a lot about how far they have to go on cost competitiveness," said iSuppli’s Semenza. He pointed out that the lifetime of 30,000 hours could be viewed as considerable "if it was the point at which users started to notice degrading brightness or color shifts." However, he said, Sony could be quoting the set’s total useful lifetime, "which suggests that consumers might start to notice changes within 10,000 or 20,000 hours, which is not so good."

"The biggest limitation that active matrix OLED has is the lack of maturity in the manufacturing process and the very limited manufacturing capacity overall," Semenza said. By contrast, the LCD industry has multiple sixth-, seventh- and soon eighth-generation fabs, each of which can produce millions of 30-, 40- and 50-inch TV panels per year. A small number of pilot and fourth-generation lines exist for AMOLEDs. These lines can have an impact on mobile phones and portable medoa players, but not on TVs, Semenza said.

Samsung’s choice
In partnering with Clairvoyante—the other 800-pound gorilla in the OLED space—Samsung hopes to overcome performance and manufacturing challenges typical of high-resolution OLED panels.

By incorporating Clairvoyante’s PenTile RGB technology, Samsung intends to develop the first handheld WVGA RGB OLED panel. To date, OLED displays for portable computers and mobile devices have been available only in formats up to QVGA (240 x 320). PenTile technology makes it possible to attain WVGA performance by eliminating one-third of the subpixels while maintaining the same display resolution.

Anticipating a strong demand for OLED technology, Samsung recently invested in additional capacity. Industry research group Display Search predicts that the AMOLED market will grow to $5.58 billion by 2011, up from $220.5 million in 2007. Samsung has been fabricating OLED panels since August 2002 for applications in car audio systems, electronic games, MP3 players and, now, cell phones.

"Our partnership with Clairvoyante will create a PenTile OLED panel that will lead the handheld market with a power-efficient, high-resolution OLED panel that supports continued innovation in emerging handheld applications," said Sung-Chul Kim, VP of Samsung SDI.

"Samsung SDI’s commitment to supporting the growing OLED market will result in small/medium displays that are increasingly competitive with LCDs," said Joel Pollack, president and CEO of Clairvoyante. "Using PenTile technology, Samsung SDI can more quickly capitalize on this market growth by overcoming production hurdles to create high-resolution displays."

Samples of the Samsung panels will be available in Q1 of 2008, with mass production slated for Q3. The new module will be demonstrated later this month at Flat Panel Display International in Yokohama, Japan.