The OLED-Info newsletter (August 2, 2022)

There's a new report that suggests that Samsung Electronics is looking into adopting OLED displays made by BOE for its Galaxy Watch 6 smartwatch (which will be released in 2023).

The same report also suggests that Samsung Electronics is looking into adopting BOE OLEDs in premium smartphones.

LG Display announced its financial results for Q2 2022, with a net loss of around $290 million (down from a profit of around $320 million a year ago) as the company's sales dropped 14.6%.

LGD says that the loss was due to weak demand for TV and IT displays, coupled with supply chain issues and the lockdowns in China. LGD says it plans to continue and reduce its LCD TV business, and to stop LCD production in Korea in 2023, earlier than expected before. The company will focus instead on OLED panels and the automotive market.

LG Display's CFO, Mr. Kim Sung-hyun, said that the negotiations with Samsung Electronics towards a WOLED panel supply deal, has been halted. The companies made some progress over the past few months, but they haven't been able to reach an agreement.

Earlier this year it was reported that the two companies finally agreed on panel prices, but that report may have been incorrect. According to analysts, the two companies still may resume the talks in the near future.

The Reflex smartwatch, by India-based Fastrack, offers a 1.3" round AMOLED display, heart rate, blood pressure and SpO2 sensors, sleep tracking, support for both iOS and Android smartphones and build-in games.

The Reflex is now shipping in India for around $100.

Samsung Electronics reported its financial results for Q2 2022, with record second-quarter revenues of 77.2 trillion Won ($59 billion USD).

Samsung Display reported record second-quarter revenue and operating profit for mobile displays driven by solid demand from major customers. Samsung specifically mentions the growth in its laptop OLED business. Performance in the large panel business was weaker due to initial ramp-up costs of Samsung's QD-OLED displays, and a decline in LCD prices.

Samsung Electronics says that it expects its sales of foldable OLED devices to increase, and even exceed its annual historic Note series sales (which is now discontinued). The company is set to start offering foldable displays in mainstream devices.

According to IDC, Samsung shipped around 190 million Note devices in total. So far, Samsung sold just over 10 million foldable phones, since launching the original Galaxy Fold in 2019. But if we look at specific phones, the gap is not so big: The last Note device, the Note 20, sold around 12 million units. The Note 10 sold around 14 million units. According to estimates, Samsung shipped around 8 million Galaxy Z Flip 3 and Galaxy Z Fold 3.

Asus' Zenfone 9 smartphone offers a 5.9" 120Hz 1100 nits 1080x2400 Super AMOLED display, a snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset, 8/16 GB of RAM, 128/256 GB of storage and dual-SIM.

The Zenfone 9 will ship in August 2022, starting at around $800.

Samsung Display has developed a new technology that enables multiple refresh rates in AMOLED displays. The idea is that one can create several zones in the display, each with its own refresh rate.

Driving at low refresh rates helps reduce the power consumption of the display and the new technology will be useful in scenarios in which a part of the screen needs high refresh rates (like video content embedded inside a web page).

Huawei's MatePad Pro 11 tablet (2022 edition) offers a 11" 120Hz 2560x1600 AMOLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 or 888 chipset, 8/12 GB of RAM, 128/256/512 GB of storage and a dual camera setup.

The MaePad Pro 11 will ship in Q3 2022.

British car maker Mini unveiled a new concept EV, called the Aceman, that features several new technologies such as a LED Matrix displays, an internal projector that shows designs on the dashboard, and more.

The Mini Aceman also includes a large round AMOLED display, which is the main (and only, it seems) display in the car. According to Mini, this same display will be used in future production EVs. Hopefully we will have more information on this new display soon.

TechRadar posted an interesting article that reviews Samsung's latest miniLED TV (QN85B Neo QLED, to be exact) and compares it with LG's OLED TVs.

The miniLED TV is excellent with high brightness, excellent color performance and a very good design. But at the end of the day, the image quality is not as good as the quality you get from an OLED TV, especially as the display suffers from blooming/haloing and non-consistent black scene performance.

NanoPalomaki posted an interesting teardown of Samsung's S95B QD-OLED TV.

This is an interesting video to watch, during which you can see the sub-pixel structure of the TV. This is only the first part of the teardown, we'll see what is revealed in the second part.

TechBlick announced a new virtual event, the industry's first event focused on miniLEDs, microLEDs and Quantum Dots displays.

Speakers & Exhibitors Include:

Our readers get a special discount for this event, see more here.

Techblick says that the interactive live (online) event will highlight the full spectrum of technological and market developments in the field, covering market analysis, novel LED growth on Si and other substrates, innovative transfer techniques, latest color conversation and novel approaches to RGB displays, drivers and backplanes, repair and inspection, manufacturing and scale up, products and demonstrators, etc.

In January 2022, Asus announced its first foldable laptop, the ZenBook 17 Fold OLED. The innovative device offers a 17.3" 2560x1920 foldable OLED display (supplied by BOE) that can fold in half to become a 12.5-inch device with dual 1920x1280 displays.

ASUS now announced that it will officially launched the foldable laptop before the IFA 2022 trade show on August 31. Asus announce da virtual event on August 31 (14:00 CEST). This will be an interesting event to watch.

Xiaomi's first AR glasses, called the Mijia Glasses Camera, is an AR HMD device that is based on two Sony OLED microdisplays (likely the ECX335S 0.7" FHD 3,000 nits type). Other features include a Snapdragon 8 chipset, dual cameras with 5X optical zoom, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.

Xiaomi has launched the new device in its own crowdfunding platform, with a cost of 2,499 Yuan (around $370 USD). The price after the campaign will rise a bit to 2,699 Yuan, or about $400.

Interestingly, last year Xiaomi launched its Smart Glasses concept, that makes use of a monochrome 0.13" VGA microLED microdisplay, but for its first commercial device, it adopted a more mature OLED technology.