Are OLEDs Ready for the Notebook PC Market?

By John Jacobs – Director, Notebook Market Research, DisplaySearch

Blogging Live from SID Display Week!

At SID in 2001, Sony showed a 13″ OLED panel and even issued a press release stating that the panel would be in a notebook PC in 2002. For many reasons, that did not occur. At CES in January, a small company (OQO) showed a 5″ OLED in a slider-style PC from Samsung SDI (now Samsung Mobile Display), and they were expecting to be shipping their product now. Unfortunately, OQO is facing serious financial troubles and is not able to bring the product to market, even though the display is ready.

Here we are at SID 2009, and Samsung Mobile Display is showing some more OLED products, many more than they showed at CES. The photo shows a 14.1″ 960 × 540 OLED TV product. Samsung stated that the yields are good, and improving, which means that manufacturing costs are coming down.

Figure: 14.1″ 960 × 540 OLED TV

 The panel size is large enough for notebook PC product, and if they can increase the resolution to 1366 × 768, then the resolution will be sufficient for the notebook PC market. Could we finally see an OLED panel shipping in a notebook PC product? Don’t be too surprised if you see a notebook PC with an OLED panel on a store shelf some time in the next 12 months.