CES 2012 brought us two exciting OLED TV announcements - 55" panels from both LG Display and Samsung, which will be released in 2012. Reaction to the OLED TVs was very positive - with both companies winning "best of CES" prizes and reviewers loving the display quality. Interestingly, some reviewers preferred Samsung's TVs while other thought LG's TV was better. But one thing for sure - everybody thought the images on the new OLED TVs are stunning. OLED was was the most talked about technology in CES.

LG Display's OLED panel uses a metal-oxide backplane and uses the company's white-OLED and color filter technology (this is not a direct emission OLED panel). The model number will be 55EM9600 and the Full-HD TV features FPR 3D, 100,000,000:1 contrast ratio and fast response time (1,000 times faster than LCD according to LG). The panel is only 4mm thick, and the whole TV weighs just 7.5Kg. LG plans to start mass production in July, with monthly capacity of 48,000 units. After the great reception at CES, it seems that LG Display already made the decision to invest in capacity expansion, and are now considering whether to build a new line or to convert an existing LCD line to OLED. There are some reports that LG are in talks with Sony to supply OLED panels. We still do not know the price of LG's TV, but DisplaySearch estimates that it will cost around $8,000, dropping to $4,000 in 2013. LG says they plan to sell 200,000 - 300,000 OLED TVs in 2012, and 2 million in 2013.

Samsung's OLED TV is also a 55" Full-HD Super-OLED panel, but it is quite different from LG's panel. Feature wise it supports active-shutter 3D and Samsung's Smart TV and Smart-Interaction technologies (can be controlled via a remote, voice, motion and even face recognition) . The model number is KN55ES9000. We do not know the price or release date, but Samsung plans to release it in Q2 or Q3 2012. Samsung refers to it as a Super-OLED - focusing on the fact that it uses direct-emission RGB OLED sub-pixels. Samsung is betting heavily on OLEDs - with 2012 investment to reach $6.1 billion.

There's no doubt now that OLED is a success, mostly because of Samsung's AMOLED displays used in mobile phones and cameras and other gadgets. DisplaySearch estimates that in 2011 90 million AMOLED displays were shipped, up 97% from 45 million units. Revenues grew by 169% from $1.25 billion in 2010 to $3.36 billion in 2011. Revenue grew faster then units because the average smartphone display is getting larger. According to DisplaySearch, AMOLED share of the small/medium display market is now 12% (up 6% in 2010).

Panasonic's president Fumio Ohtsubo says that Panasonic is indeed developing an OLED TV, and hopes to release it in 2012. In fact Panasonic hopes they won't be "too late" in this market. Last month it was reported that Panasonic is working on an 8.5-Gen Pilot R&D line.

Back in 2009, Panasonic teamed up with Sumitomo to jointly-develop OLED TVs, based on Sumitomo's P-OLED materials and technology. We haven't heard anything about this collaboration since, so we do not know whether Panasonic will attempt to produce SM-OLED or P-OLED based TVs. Panasonic seems to be quite behind both Samsung and LG Display, it will be interesting to see how they plan to release OLED TVs so soon.

I'm happy to announce that The OLED Handbook is the #774 best selling book on Lulu.com. Lulu is one of the most popular print-on-demand book publishers today, and being in the top #1000 is a nice recognition. The Handbook is selling very well - it's great to see how many companies from all sorts of industries and from all over the world are interested in OLEDs. The Lulu sales rank takes into account the sales revenue and not just the number of books sold (i.e. the price of the book times number of sales). The OLED Handbook costs $149.99 for the printed edition and $97 for the digital (PDF) edition - and provides an invaluable reference into OLED technology, industry and market.

January was a quiet month for OLED lighting - seems like the focus of the industry was on OLED TVs. But we did have a couple of interesting updates. The first one came from Lumiotec - which signed a license deal with Universal Display. Lumiotec will use UDC's technology and materials to launch phosphorescent 40 lm/W OLED lighting panels. Lumiotec says that they will start delivering sample panels in February 2012 - mainly 145x145 mm square panels. The company will start mass production these panels by April.

Meanwhile Philips have set an ambitious plan to reach 120 lm/W efficiency for OLED lighting by 2019. This is quite an increase from the panels Philips make today. The regular Lumiblades offer around 12 lm/W, while the Lumiblade Plus (a phosphorescent panel, developed by Konica Minolta and produced by Philips) offers 45 lm/W. We recently reviewed Philips' new Lumiblades.

DuPont announced that it is building a $30 million OLED TV pilot production line at its Stine-Haskell Research Center off Elkton Road in Newark. DuPont will allocate 26 engineers and 9 professional works for the project, which aims to develop manufacturing technology. The pilot line will use their nozzle-printing (or "spray-printing") technology which uses a continuous stream of ink to deposit OLED materials. This is a very fast process - DuPont says it can print a 50" TV in under 2 minutes, but the display isn't optimized in the sub-pixel level and is so less efficient than in other patterning technologies. DuPont claims that this technology may make an OLED TV cheaper than an LCD TV. Back in November 2011 DuPont announced that it has signed a licensing agreement with a leading Asian AMOLED maker for this technology, and the company just revealed that it got $20 million in OLED license fees in 4Q 2011.

There are reports that Sony has quit the consumer OLED TV market. The company will continue to produce OLED monitors for the professional/corporate market. This created quite a stir on the web, but it's hardly surprising - and it isn't really news... Sony's only OLED TV, the XEL-1 was discontinued back in February 2010, and Sony said several times that it is currently focusing on the professional market. As we mentioned above, some suggest that that LG Display are in talks with Sony to supply OLED panels.