The OLED Handbook was launched a couple of months ago - and so far reaction (and sales) have been great. We are now happy to offer a printed (hardcopy) edition of the book. The OLED Handbook costs $149.99 in full-color hardcopy and can be bought online from Lulu.com (a print-on-demand service).

The OLED handbook (written by Ron Mertens, OLED-Info's editor) is an invaluable guide to display engineers, business developers, researchers, equipment vendors, OLED material companies, private investors and anyone who wants to learn more about OLEDs today and in the future.

LG Display (LGD) announced that they will stop investing in small/medium sized OLED panels. The company says that their AH-IPS LCD technology is better and more profitable than OLEDs. In fact LG says that Samsung are misleading the market as ""OLED displays are not suitable in terms of picture quality, response time, energy consumption and contrast ratios". LGD will probably still produce AMOLEDs in the recently opened Gen-4.5 plant (they are already supplying panels to Nokia) - but it seems that LGD will not expand the monthly capacity to 12,000 as planned (currently they make 4,000 substrates a month).

LG still thinks that OLED is the future technology - but for TVs and not mobile phones or tablets, and they plan to accelerate OLED TV development. The current plan is to launch a 55" OLED TV by the second half of 2012. Production volume will be small at first (tens of thousands of units), but this will be expanded to mass production (the company will 'observe the market reaction' first). There are already some rumors that Apple are negotiating with LG to supply OLED TV panels for an upcoming Apple TV.

This is not entirely surprising. LGD already decided to skip Gen-5.5 and go straight to Gen-8 to produce OLED TVs - indeed there were reports that the company plans to start building a pilot line soon. According to earlier reports, LG plans to fabricate white OLEDs with color filters (this technology was developed at Kodak) - and not 'true OLED' that uses color OLED subpixels.

There are some consistent rumors about a new Super AMOLED HD display coming from Samsung. There is little information available - as its name suggests, the display offers HD 720p resolution (1280x720), and it will make its first appearance in Google's Nexus 3 phone (perhaps called Nexus Prime).

Having such a display on a mobile phone seems highly unlikely. Samsung currently can't make such a high PPI AMOLED (unless they move to LITI, but this isn't expected anytime soon). Perhaps the Nexus 3 will actually be a tablet and not a phone. Some unrelated reports suggest that Samsung are working on a new device (called the Galaxy Q) that will bridge the gap between tablets and phones - featuring a 5.3" Super AMOLED Plus display. Achieving an HD (720p) display on a 5.3" screen requires around 270ppi - which means that Samsung will not be able to offer that resolution using their current technology (which limits AMOLEDs to around 200ppi).

Samsung announced that they sold 5 million Galaxy S II phones - in just 85 days (on July 22nd). That's a lot faster than the Galaxy S - which took 125 days to sell 5 million. The Galaxy S took 7 months to reach 10 million units - and Samsung says that the S II is expected to reach that amount sooner too (The S II isn't selling in the US yet).

Back in April, Philips unveiled a new OLED panel called Lumiblade Plus - which is the world's most efficient panel under production (45lm/w). We knew that this panel was developed by Konica Minolta, but we didn't have any official information from either company. In July Konica Minolta issued a press release with some more information: it appears that indeed the materials and structure were developed by KM and the production will be handled by Philips. Production will start in autumn 2011.

We do not have all the details yet, but after talking to KM it seems that both companies will offer the panel for sale. It's not clear whether Philips will pay royalties for KM on each panel, but it might be so. Philips are already accepting orders for the Lumiblade plus (€120, minimum quantity is 100 units) - but KM says that the panels are not shipping yet. There was some speculation whether these panels use Universal Display's PHOLED materials (KM signed a license agreement with UDC in 2008) - and we can confirm that indeed it is so. According to a flyer the companies distributed, the panel uses full phosphorescent organic materials supplied by Konica Minolta using UniversalPHOLED technology from UDC.

Lumiotec announced it will start selling two OLED lamps in September 1st - in Japan, Europe and other countries. The first one is the Hanger - a portable lamp that comes in several colors and has a really cool design. The Hanger uses Lumiotec's 14.5x14.5 Square white OLED panels and it will cost ¥35,000 (or about $450) which makes it the cheapest OLED lamp available.

The second lamp (shown above) is the Vanity - a white desktop lamp. It will also feature the same OLED panel as the Hanger, and will cost ¥55,000 (or about $700).

Lumiotec target is to sell 3,000 Hanger lamps and 1,000 Vanity lamps in the first year.