Samsung showed this prototype OLED laptop in 2008, and a year later predicted that it would sell products in Q3’10LG Display has solved the challenges it had been facing with the production of mid-size OLED panels, and plans to enter the market for OLED monitor and notebook displays in 2016 or 2017.
The report comes from Korea’s ET News, which says that LGD will show its first prototype at CES in January. The company has managed to overcome pixel deterioration (i.e. burn-in) issues. Monitors are more susceptible to burn-in than other screen types, as more static content is viewed on them (for instance, the Windows start button). This means that certain parts of the screen display the same image for long periods of time, and so the light-emitting elements begin to lose their brightness.
OLED-Info says that LGD is also working to solve problems with blurred images on its OLED displays, which occur when the screens are used with various image sizes and monitor frequencies. The company will produce monitor panels first and notebooks later.
Analyst Comment
I wonder about any new display technology which has advantages in weight and thickness moving into monitors before notebooks. The reality is that LCDs are thin enough for monitor applications and weight hasn’t been an issue since the days of CRTs. Monitors are strongly driven by price and OLED is at a significant disadvantage there. Really the only reason that a buyer might want an OLED over an LCD is visual performance, especially if they are a content creator of video or games or a photographer, or a power game player, where response time and dynamic range would be great advantages.
Notebooks continue to be driven by power consumption issues. OLEDs can be lower power than LCDs, but generally only when most of the image is dark. When you have an image that is mainly white, as it often is in data processing applications, OLED can be at a disadvantage and that would make life harder for notebook applications, although it wouldn’t make much difference to the attractiveness of OLEDs in a desktop monitor.
Overall, some competition for LCD for really top desktop performance would be a real improvement in the market. As we have seen in TV, LCD engineers have always been able to respond to competition. Seeing, perhaps, high end gaming buyers switching to OLED could prompt LCD to even higher levels than so far achieved. (BR)
