LG Display announced that they are investing $1.6 Billion USD to build an OLED panel factory in Paju, South Korea. This initial cost will cover the building, the “foundations” of the clean rooms, and basic infrastructure such as water and power. Construction will begin immediately. The plant is expected to cost $8.7 Billion USD by the time it starts producing displays, which the company anticipates for early 2018. It will produce panels for smart watches, cars, and even large TVs.
The shift from LCD to OLED has been anticipated for a while, but it seems like the former technology just kept remaining viable. It kept ahead of plasma technology, despite LCD being considered inferior in terms of contrast and maintainability by some, and outlived it. SED threatened to crush it, but never really became available because Canon basically misunderstood patent licensing terms from a Texas-based nanotech company. Mobile devices helped push LED panels away from TN technology and into IPS-like panels, which closed the gap between LCD and early OLED.
LCD would eventually need to reach its maximum viable potential though, and heightened availability of OLED could do it. Hopefully the technology makes it to consumer desktop panels relatively soon. Display manufacturers have been experimenting with higher refresh rates, better displays, and higher resolution recently, but adding OLED to the mix should push the industry toward focusing on contrast and color reproduction even more heavily.
Nice, maybe in a few years
Nice, maybe in a few years the scourge of LCD will be over and I could finally replace my CRTs
If we all collectively
If we all collectively stopped buying LCD`s at all, maybe just the 144hz IPS ones when on sale – we`d get lots and lots of OLED monitors the next year
(with all the good specs and those sweet 0.01ms OLED response times across the board, instead of the 15ms avergae that LCD`s have)
You all know that right?
No, cause OLEDs suffer
No, cause OLEDs suffer burn-in.
TV and desktop applications aren’t the same.
I don’t think 2 companies that hate each other so much, like Samsung and LG do, would give up the opportunity to stick it to the competition, if they had the possibility technology-wise. Why would they hold off launching a superior technology to market, if they could outpace the competition that way.
Well one reason is a huge,
Well one reason is a huge, almost $10 billion USD price tag for a product that's facing commoditization and targeted to relatively frugal consumers lately.
Burn out actually, but the
Burn out actually, but the result is largely the same.
The practicality of a workaround is questionable, but it’s not very complicated outside of a maximum brightness setting, as the individual LED’s(mostly blue) decay the maximum brightness will be limited by it’s weakest link.
Internal self calibration would more or less remove this issue, but at the cost of a higher price tag it defeats itself on the spot.
I’d love to know whether this
I’d love to know whether this factory will be producing RGB OLED panels (each R, G and B subpixel has an R, G or B organophsophor mix) or wOLED panels (all subpixels have a white organophosphor mix, with a coloured filter on top). The wOLED panels are less energy efficient, but much simpler to manufacture and the subpixels all degrade at the same rate.