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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: 2) by Techwolf on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:50PM
OLED/AMOLED displays need to die of a quick death, they are just as bad as CRT. Nice display, but wears out and suffers from perminet burn in. My one phone suffers from this just three month of buying it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:04PM
Havent had that problem with mine that I have had for over a year.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:41PM
All sorts of electronic crap can die quickly for a variety of reasons. Was it covered under a warranty? Do you have more than one anecdote (failing OLED display) to share?
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(Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday December 21 2016, @01:57AM
My AMOLED Samsung is 3 years old and has zero "burn-in" and "wearout". Your phone must be crap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @05:33AM
Me too, the AMOLED display on my Samsung Moment (SPH M900) from circa late 2009/early 2010 looks fine.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday December 21 2016, @04:07AM
"Just as bad as CRT" is hardly as damning as you seem to think. A good CRT has *vastly* superior contrast and color fidelity compared to a LCD display. Yes, burn in is a problem, but that what screen savers are for.
LCD screens have exactly three advantages over CRTs: larger sizes(at low depth/weight), lower power consumption, and freedom from burn-in. None of which are relevant to the actual image quality. OLEDs manage to keep the first two advantages, while also offering contrast at least as good as CRTs. They've got a long way to go in terms of longevity, but if you have money to burn they're hard to beat.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday December 21 2016, @09:24AM
Yes, burn in is a problem, but that what screen savers are for.
No, that's what using power management to turn off the damned display is for. Screen savers are a joke and a waste, just let them die already.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday December 21 2016, @06:12PM
They were quite handy on CRTs though. Especially after a few years of use, a CRT might well take 5-20 minutes to "fully warm up" during which time color calibration and other properties would be different than in steady state.
But yeah, they were mostly an amusing distraction and a way to avoid having a large black rectangle filling your field of view while you were working on other things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @05:30PM
You missed at least one obvious advantage of LCDs over CRTs. CRTs produce X-rays and are built with thick lead glass to block it: a significant environmental hazard which is simply not present in any other display technology.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday December 21 2016, @06:22PM
True.
They're also difficult to make large screens with, especially reasonably flat ones, at least without including obvious black lines due to internal supports. A 40" screen is experiencing over 10,000lbs of force on it's face from atmospheric pressure. Not really a problem for LCDs since they're experiencing the same force on both sides, but when the screen is one face of a giant vacuum tube...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @05:05PM
I can verify that burn in does occur on OLED screens. For me it's most obvious on my Moto X phone when running a full-screen app. I can see a faint bar where the Android controls are usually located.
Having used the phone for over 2 years now, it's not as bad as I was led to believe it would be. Between this and the crappy contrast of backlit LCD, I think I might prefer this for most applications.