Samsung are very bullish on AMOLEDs, and are not afraid to say it. Samsung's AMOLED business is now profitable, and Samsung can't meet customer demand (in fact the HTC Incredible's shortage is attributed to Samsung's AMOLED displays). They have committed $2.2 billion on new AMOLED production lines for their upcoming 5.5-Gen AMOLED plant, which will go online in 2012 (or late 2011). Samsung claims that by 2015, AMOLED could become the mainstream display technology for TVs, and they see how the market could "support" 1 billion AMOLED mobile displays in the same year.

Samsung has shown us a new 19" transparent AMOLED - the world's largest. Samsung are said to be working on a 7" super-AMOLED tablet. The rumors say it'll launch in 2H 2010 (perhaps in August) and it'll run Google's Android OS.

As always, OLED lighting continues to provide us with exciting news. May was 'OLED LAMP' month - we are finally seeing real OLED lamps on the market. The prices are still very high, but it's still good to see companies experiment with those new panels. Philips are offering two new lamps. One is called the EDGE, and it's already available now. The 2nd lamp is the O'Leaf, which should be available soon. We do not know the price of these new lamps.

WAC lighting releases an ORBEOS-based OLED chandelier called SOL. This is an actual product, although we do not know the price and whether it's available yet.

Finally, this month we have learned about an interesting new OLED Lighting company called Blackbody. We talked with their CTO, Bruno Dussert-Vidalet. Blackbody is the commercial brand of Astron FIAMM for the general lighting industry, working on OLED panels. Blackbody are producing their own panels (in Toulon, France) using small-molecule technology. They have a Gen 2 tool, and are making 47x37 OLED panels that feature about 25lm/W efficiency. They are not selling panels directly, only in lamps. The first lamp they unveiled is the Light-Photon, which was designed by Philippe Starck. It uses a single OLED panel, and is currently offered for $5900 (hand-made, pre-production prototypes). The second lamp Blackbody announced in May is The Big Bang - a large chandelier with 282 OLED panels (!).

Universal Displays' new light-blue OLED material offers significant performance gains compared to their previous light-blue material. UDC are suggesting a new all-phosphorescent AMOLED architecture that uses a fourth light-blue sub-pixel. The introduction of a light blue sub-pixel can significantly extend the operational lifetime of an OLED display and reduce the display's power consumption by as much as 33%, as compared to an RGB OLED display using a fluorescent blue sub-pixel. This can be applied to Lighting as well, and UDC are showing 15cmx15cm OLED lighting panels that use this technology. The panels feature 50lm/W efficiency.

Dupont announced new record lifetime performance in printed OLEDs for displays. They say that this is sufficient for OLED TVs. Dupont claim that they can print a 50" OLED TV in under two minutes. They are using a custom-made printer from Dainippon Screen.