This is one of those "I’ll believe it when I see it" stories, with an ending that has yet to be written. Well, we can now start (OK, begin to start) believing as Sony is now taking on-line orders for its ground breaking XEL-1, an eleven inch OLED-TV due to officially ship on December 1st. Initial reports out of Japan say: "the entire allotment was snapped up in a little over an hour," according to the Nikkei.Net news service. Yea - and I bet half of them went to competitors for evaluation.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor
Projection Monthly

The company promises distinct advantages over the LCD technology "de jour", including a one-million-to-one contrast ratio, high peak brightness and a response time that measures in the microseconds. But it comes with some distinct limitations including size and price.

Researchers have been working on the technology for years, and OLED panels began surfacing in small hand held displays (the first a Kodak digital camera) mostly in the sub 4-inch class. These size restrictions reflected both organic material life issues and manufacturing efficiency limitations that kept the new technology at bay.

This past May, Sony stunned the crowd at SID announcing a new breakthrough manufacturing process it calls "Micro Silicon" technology that uses a diode laser thermal annealing process (dLTA for short) to create micro crystalline silicon TFTs. The company presented three papers on the new process to standing-room only crowds of engineers looking for a glimpse of what Sony hopes to be the future of television manufacturing.

It’s interesting to note that we might never have seen this day had Sony been a bit more astute ten years earlier. In 1998, Sharp saw the winds of change in the DTV transition from analog broadcast that happened to coincide with the move from "Fat CRTs" to "Flat LCD TVs" and bet big on the transition.

In the meantime, Sony was fat and happy dominating the CRT TV space, when it suddenly found itself missing the LCD / DTV boat. The company was forced to go the difficult (but successful) path of partnering with Korean rival Samsung to form the S-LCD joint venture based on Samsung LCD technology with main production facilities located not in Japan, but Korea.

So with a jump-start from a company desperate to recapture the glory days of its TV technology dominance, we now see the launch of the next generation technology, OLED-with the promise of ultra-thin displays, low power, high (really high) contrast, fast (really fast) response times, no backlight, and the list goes on.

But keep in mind, the success of OLED technology is not a "fait accompli" for Sony. As we reported in the September issue of our Large Display Report: iSuppli’s Riddhi Patel, said "Any tech coming into the TV market now has to be many steps ahead of where existing plasma and LCDs are at. The technology has to be substantially better and (have) comparable prices." And an 11-inch TV selling for over $1700 in the crowded flat panel market has a ways to go before universal adoption.

For now, let’s celebrate the success of the Sony engineering team in getting the technology out of the lab and (almost) into the hands of consumers. That is a big step forward and a testament to the determination of Sony to live up to its hard won, top-tier brand image. -SS

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