In the past month we posted a couple of interesting OLED lighting stories. The first one was an interview with Verbatim's OLED team. Verbatim will market and sell OLED Lighting panels made by Mitsubishi and Pioneer, and they tell us all about the upcoming panels. They plan to start mass production in 2011 and samples in 2010. Our second story was a hands-on review of Lumiotec's OLED lighting panels. These sample-kits include a 15cmX15cm OLED panel - which is big and bright. We compare it to Philip's Lumiblade and OSRAM's ORBEOS OLED panels.

Nanomarkets hosted a teleconferece on September 8th with the firm's latest OLED Lighting market forecasts. They have now released the transcript of this teleconference. Nanomarkets projects $6.0 billion in revenues by 2015 driven by the need for cost efficient lighting in a number of different applications, including general illumination, architectural lighting, back lighting, vehicular lighting and signage.

Osram is building an OLED Lighting production line in Regensburg, Germany. The company will invest 50 million euros (around $70 million) in the production facility and in research on LED applications. Commissioning of the production line is scheduled for mid-2011.

okia has announced three new smartphones in September, all with AMOLEDs: the E7, C6 and the C7. The E7 has a 4" display, the C7 a 3.5" one and the C6 a 3.2" one. The E7 and C6 displays use use Nokia's new ClearBlack Display technology (CBD) - which includes a polarized filter that is said to deliver better outdoor visibility. The phones will be released towards the end of 2010, in Europe. The E7 will cost €495, the C6 will cost €260 and the C7 will cost €335.

Mitsubishi announced that it begun selling their Diamond Vision OLED displays. These are modular displays made out of 128x128 pixel, 384mm by 34mm PMOLED modules. Each pixel is about 3mm in size. Mitsubishi will sell the displays in sizes of 100" and larger. The Diamond Vision is bright (1,200cd/m²) and has a good contrast (twice as better as LED, says Mitsubishi) - so it can be used in brightly-lit areas such as airports or stations. The OLEDs were jointly developed by Mitsubishi and Pioneer.

Mitsubishi has already installed the first screen, over at Merck's new Material Research Center in Darmstadt, Germany. The display measures 3.84m by 2.3m with a 1280x768 resolution. It has 60 modules (each is 128x128), and weights a total of 480Kg(!). Merck will use the display as an information system for presentations and events.

It seems that Samsung is enjoying a nice success with their AMOLED phones. First we hear that the Epic 4G is one of Sprint's best-selling devices for first-day sales. We also hear that the Wave enjoyed over a million sales in Europe, four months after its release. The Galaxy S is also successful, with 2 million phones sold in the US already.

Samsung's upcoming 5.5-Gen plant seems to be advancing, and Samsung expects the plant to go online in July 2011. This new plant will increase Samsung's AMOLED capacity ten fold: from 3 million displays a month to 30 million (assuming all displays made in the new plant will be around 3"). Samsung seems to be focused on small displays or medium: they say it's too premature to commercialize OLED TVs. But they might release AMOLED Tabs in 2011.

The most interesting news is a couple of rumors via Twitter. According to those rumors, Samsung has signed a deal to supply Super-AMOLED display to Apple. In fact Samsung has committed all of their Super-AMOLEDs in 2011. This is interesting as Samsung's new 5.5-Gen AMOLED plant (that will produce ten times the current capacity) will go on line in the middle of 2011 - so theoretically Samsung might indeed have enough capacity to satisfy Apple. But will they really stop using these displays in their own products? The second rumor is that both the Samsung Wave and Galaxy-S aren't in production anymore as Samsung simply do not have enough Super AMOLED displays. The company is working towards Super-LCD versions of these phones. Again, these are just rumors, no official word yet.

One of the potential markets for OLED is the automotive market, and we have seen a couple of interesting concepts this month. The first is the Car.Bones by Astron-Fiamm (the parent company of BlackBody who makes OLED lamps). The Car.Bones concept is all about OLED Lighting: headlights, inside-lighting, turn indicators, and more. The second concept is the Kia POP that has a transparent OLED panel behind the steering wheel. The OLED displays the speed, battery charge and more information.