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Sony’s OLED TVs

Posted by Analysts in Flat Panel Displays, TVs on April 30, 2007  |  21 comments

At the 2007 FINETECH Show, Sony announced its intention to begin selling its 11″ OLED TVs also demonstrated at the January 2007 CES show to consumers. The OLED TVs were specified at 600 nits of brightness, 1,000,000:1 contrast with 100% NTSC color gamut and can be ~3mm thick. This OLED TV represents an improvement in brightness, contrast and form factor vs. all other display technologies. In addition, because of OLEDs’ fast response times, they don’t suffer the motion blur that affects LCD TVs.

The technology behind this product is small molecule OLED material and a CMOS LTPS backplane produced at their joint venture with Toyoda. The red material is the highly efficient phosphorscent type from UDC fabricated by PPG. The blue is likely from Idemitsu Kosan. It is a top emission design which improves brightness, but it also uses a color filter which lowers brightness and makes it even more costly. They went with the color filter along with the RGB OLED materials to meet their color gamut requirements. Samsung SDI, which has a more recent design, is able to achieve the same color gamut without the color filter. We would expect Sony’s next design to either exclude the color filter or go with white OLED material and maintain the color filter which would be bad news for UDC unless they went with UDC’s white material.

Sony indicated this product would be priced a few times higher than a similarly sized LCD TV. It will be produced at a rate of 1,000 units per month. They hope this product will become a status symbol. Would you buy this product for $750 – $1000? How much more would you pay? How much more would you pay for a 40″ OLED TV vs. a 40″ LCD TV?

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  • http://www.oled-info.com Ron Mertens

    Interesting info. Don’t you mean Toyota? (You wrote Toyoda)?

    I think that your new blog is great, and I’m going to subscribe to it.

    Thanks,

    Ron
    http://www.oled-info.com

  • Rajesh

    For someone who paid $ 4000 for a 42″ non-HD plasma TV just 2-3 years back or for a 40″ LCD TV 1-2 years back, paying $ 4000 for a 40″ OLED is a no-brainer. You get a much superior product that has fantastic snob value for the same amount of money that got you a product you have to hide today.

    For a really great product, the 11″ would sell at $ 700 and the 40″ at $4000.

  • Ross Young

    Ron,

    Thanks for subscribing to our blog!

    The official name of the company Sony has the LTPS TFT LCD joint venture with is Toyoda Automatic Loom Works.
    This JV, known as ST-LCD, was formed in October of 1997 and has around 40K substrate per month input capacity at 600 x 720mm. This size is well sutied to small/medium displays for mobile phones and cameras which they focus on, but is not competitive for large sized TVs as it must compete with 2m2 substrates in a-Si which are well suited to 40″+ production.

    Thanks,
    Ross

  • alaide pellegrini mammana

    Nice news and nice comments. But, what about lifetime?

  • Ross Young

    Thank you for writing!

    Samsung SDI which is expected to start MP with AMOLEDs on a 730 x 920mm substrate very soon is now claiming 50K hours of lifetime.
    In addition, some claim that in TVs lifetime won’t be as severe of a problem as in PC applications due to the lack of white content which is harder of OLED lifetimes.
    It will be interesting to see what kind of warranties are available on OLED TVs and how it differs with LCD and PDP warranty costs.

  • OLED

    Any thoughts on where Sony might be getting their Green materials for this tv? Also, if Samsung is able to achieve the color gamut without a color filter, why wouldn’t Sony aim for this as well? What would be the benefit of using a white oled and color filter combo vs. UDC materials?

  • Ross Young

    The green material is almost a commodity and several companies can provide it, including Kodak, Idemitsu Kosan, NSC, Hayashibara or UDC (PPG).

    Sony is using an older process developed 3 years ago and it required a color filter to achieve the proper color gamut. They are developing a new process that does not require a color filter because they can use more highly saturated material.

    The benefits of using a white material with a color filter are:
    1) Elimination of the need for a fine metal mask (FMM) to pattern R,G,B in an evaporation process. Fine metal masks are expensive, must be cleaned every 200 substrates and then last only 5 cleanings. The R,G, B process is also lower yielding because of the patterning. Moreover, it is believed that the FMM will not scale beyond 4th gen.
    2) Using a white with a color filter eliminates any limitations on pixel density
    3) The use of white material with a color filter that is R,G,B,W produces better colors and saves on power because the white light is unfiltered. It actually works better for the R,G,B gray scales.
    4) There is less differential aging.

    The offset to the color filter is the cost of the color filter and the reduced luminance because of the light blocked by the color filter. There have been no good studies comparing the difference in power consumption using R,G,B and white w/CF and it is likely to be very image related.

  • http://www.hemangshah.info Hemang Shah

    Very interesting news. I am sure they have made the display robust through encapsulations. Do correct me if I am wrong. What could be the reasons for defects in a display made out of OLEDs? I work on LCDs and not OLEDs, hence the stupid question.

  • http://underdevelopment Michael Kim

    Ross,

    Not sure you’re right about Sony’s color filter on microcavity system. A poster on the Yahoo board, zikzak2, posted this response about what I viewed as a complicated solution:

    >

  • http://underdevelopment Michael Kim
  • http://underdevelopment Michael Kim
  • Ross Young

    Not sure I understand the point. Figures 2, 4 and 6 all show the color filter, so what are you questioning exactly?

  • Ross Young

    As the Sony brief says, another benefit of the color filter along with the microcavity device structure is to minimize ambient reflected light
    without the need of a circular polarizer, boosting contrast. The elimination of the circular polarizer helps offset the loss of brightness from the adoption of the color filter and shelps to reduce cost. However, it is still an expensive solution though due to the color filter which is typically the most expensive component in an LCD.

  • http://underdevelopment Michael Kim

    I don’t believe there should be much efficiency loss from Sony’s color filter. In a filtered white, you lose 2/3 of the photons. However, Sony has a red filter on a red pixel, a green filter on a green pixel, and blue on blue. A microcavity already tunes color very well. The filter narrows the spectrum some but not much, so brightness shouldn’t decline much. As you wrote, it appears the primary goal of filtering is to decrease ambient reflection. Filtered white, on the other hand, makes no sense for portable devices – inefficient. Plug-in TVs? So-so color gamut, no better than an LCD, especially at lower brightness. Contrast would be excellent, and RGBW has benefits. Bottom line: Sony wants a homerun and will pattern.

  • http://www.oled-display.net erik

    Samsung SDI said that the lifetime is currently about 20,000 hours. It should have at least 50,000 hours or more for TV application. Samsung SDI wants to reach this lifetime in 2009
    http://www.oled-display.net
    http://www.oled-display.info

  • Ross Young

    A note on the reflection issue from our OLED expert, Barry Young:

    “There are a number of approaches that can solve the reflection problem including a destructive technique and a circular polarizer that are much less expensive than using a color filter. Sony’s defense for using a color filter must be questioned when one considers the cost, the impact on luminance and their shift away from a color filter in their next generation product.

    The use of a microcavity is not unique to the use of a color filter as Samsung SDI’s product also uses a microcavity to take advantage of light reflections without requiring a color filter. If a color filter is used it will be a strategic decision to take advantage of the ability to scale the evaporation process and get rid of the FMM, as opposed to the reflection benefits.”

  • OLED

    A couple more questions regarding Phosphorescent OLED materials, or UDC PHOLED materials specifically: Is the red PHOLED material CIE coordinates, lifetime, and efficiencies sufficient for all display applications? I know blue has been the bane of the OLED industry for years now. What sort of CIE coordinates, lifetime, and efficiency metrics do you think are needed in blue for widespread commercialisation? Any other comment on commercialisation as they pertain to chemicals. It seems to me the manufacturing processes will come with time, but no manufacturers will want to invest in the R&D or build a new plant without first seeing sufficient OLED chemicals available.

  • Mike Freyler

    Cymer’s TCZ900X LTPS tool has been demo’ed for over a year in Korea.
    Claim is far superior for AMOLED.
    Is Samsung using it?
    Sony and Samsung have a JV on flat panels, correct?

  • BOLED

    what kind of encapsulation was adopted? how about life time and power consumption

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  • Crossi

    I saw that OLED XEL1 live. Picture is really amazing. I didn’t know that so may gadgets already have that screen. Check out http://www.oledgadgets.com. That Russian Art. Lebedev keyboard is really something. But all that nice toys are still to expensive to me. Maybe next year…