Will LED Make OLED TV DOA?
By Paul Gray – Director, European TV Research
Walking around IFA it occurs to me that the competitive niche that OLED expected to occupy (ultra thin, ultimate performance) is rapidly being invaded. We all know that historically the best technology doesn’t always win: What counts is getting over the hill from immature product to a mass-produced, mass-market priced offering.
Seeing the wonderful OLEDs in the Samsung and LGE booths made me appreciate how far LCD has come. LCD screens are bigger than OLED, have equivalent levels of contrast and color saturation, and are just as thin. In real life, I imagine that no practicable screen can be less than
10 mm thick, simply to solve the problems of physical rigidity, connectors and fitting a PCB inside the cabinet.
Figure 1: Samsung OLED (left) and Side View with Edge-lit LCDs (right) at IFA
Figure 2: LGE OLEDs (Front and Side View of Bare Panels) at IFA
So OLED’s space is increasingly occupied by LED-lit LCD. Therefore, the returns from an OLED product are ever more marginal, at least in TV. Can anyone make an OLED TV investment case in the coming years?
For TVs, I think you’re probably right. OLED will find its niche in portable devices and some vertical markets. Hopefully manufacturers can determine which is better for TVs before creating a mass-market for OLED — and decide to go with what they know is superior and not get greedy. I could see manufacturers tendency to take advantage of the “new tech” aspect of marketing OLED even if LED-lit LCDs are just as good — if not better.
Thanks for the story!
One of the reasons LTPS LCD failed to reach market shares some people it would back in the 1990s was relentless price-performance improvement by semiconductor suppliers. The cost of buying driver chips fell faster than the cost of fabricating drivers on glass did. Fabricating large LTPS arrays remains a challenge while LED suppliers are making chips smaller and brighter every year. I assume semiconductor suppliers will continue winning this race until such time as there is an alternative to LTPS for OLED backplanes.
In addition, advent of Gen-8 fabs in China will sustain LCD dominance. New fabricators will have their hands full getting conventional TFT processes on line. They can concentrate on the LCD side of things but offer LED backlights by leveraging the supply chain that is becoming well established. If these new fabs sustain the historical rate of LCD TV price decline, then OLED TV sets will face even higher barriers to entry. Every year of delay makes entry more challenging from a financial perspective.
I think also that LED will hit the market of TV and OLED will find other niches. The most critical poind of LCD TV was the black wasn’t that black, comparing to plasma technology. Now LED technology fits the demand to a more attractive price than OLED does. For example the Sharp LED 32″ Tv costs in Germany only €799 (ca. $543) actually, that isn’t much compare to common LCD TV.
I was quite surprised reading this article and the comments. First of all it seems quite clear to me that OLED has enough of quality advantage to attract customers. Edge LED backlight does not offer any real picture quality improvement, so I think you really make such backlight much more important than it really is.
Secondly both the original post and the comments got outdated in just a few month. The dynamics of OLED development in 2010 is amazing. We have had reports about massive investment in manufacturing capacity, about demand for OLED outstripping available supply. New production technologies are also introduced. Equipment from TCZ (thin beam laser annealing) and several other companies (the DuPont announcement is very promising) will change the rules of the game within a couple of years. OLED TVs can be taken for granted. By 2015 they will be mass produced and they will gradually increase market share at the expense of LCD. If OLEDs indeed beome cheaper than LCD in the future, LCD will gradually disappear from the market.