In our recent look at the state of OLED televisions, we focused on the present—but what about the future?
[...] LG isn't the only OLED player in the world, mind you, but it is currently the only OLED TV manufacturer in the United States, and it also makes the panels sold by Panasonic, the only other OLED TV player in the international market.
LG has said on the record that the white OLED technology purchased from Kodak gave it a giant lead over other companies' "RGB OLED" TV panels. LG says its panels cost far less to manufacture than the competition's—the panels' crystals are easier to line up in a cost-effective manner.
Others may well catch up in the larger-screen OLED space in the near future, of course. When that happens, it stands to reason that competitors, particularly the deluge of Chinese companies entering the TV manufacturing space, will combine aggressive discounts and other innovations to steal attention away from LG.
For now, many manufacturers do produce panels with OLED technology—though you may better know these as AMOLED displays. (You'll find them in smartphones from Samsung, Huawei, and Google.) Their main difference from larger-panel OLED displays comes from that "AM" prefix, which means "active matrix." This refers to the process of sending electrical current through the panel for the sake of pixel illumination, which used to be a less-efficient "passive matrix" process. The older way proved too power-hungry and slow for the kind of quick-performance screen refreshes needed in a smartphone. (LG doesn't advertise the kind of matrix employed in its latest OLED TVs, but based on what we know, it can probably be described as a combination of AMOLED and WOLED (white-emitting OLED).)
In the mobile-screen space, AMOLED and in-plane switching (IPS) LCDs continue to battle for supremacy, with each offering different color, brightness, darkness, thinness, power, and performance advantages.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @06:20PM
I read this story at Ars yesterday and I thought it didn't live up to the headline at all.
Seemed to be really light on both details of current products and nothing more than random speculation about what might be cool to do in the future without any reporting of what any OLED manufacturers actually have planned.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday December 20 2016, @07:09PM
We do know that these manufacturers are working on thin and bendy displays. A tablet or dumb display that looks and feels like a sheet of laminated paper would be an interesting development. It's not speculation, but a release date certainly would be.
Slightly curved rigid screens? Already exists!
You're right, the most important part of the article was the reminder that CES is in a few weeks.
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