The premier display industry conference, SID 2012 took place at the beginning of June 2012, and OLED-Info's Ron Mertens was there. It seems that OLED technology and displays were the focus of this year's show, and Samsung's and LGD's OLED TV units were the hit of the show. My own "best of SID" list contains the OLED TVs, UDC's transparent bezel-free OLED panel, Wexler's flexible e-reader, Mirasol's displays and Ignis' a-Si based AMOLED technology.

I published several blog posts, detailing my updates from SID from all the companies that I visited and met with:

• Universal Display: new emitter materials, bezel-free transparent panel and more
• Samsung: 55" OLED TV panels and smaller mobile AMOLED panels
• LG Display: 55" OLED panels, bullish forecasts
• eMagin: OLED microdisplays updates
• RiTdisplay: a-Si based AMOLED production by the end of 2012
• Ignis Innovation: a-Si compensation technology advances, 20" AMOLED prototypes
• Quantum Dots: updates from Nanosys and QDVision
• Novaled: new materials and OLED lighting prototypes
• Chimei Innolux: AMOLED production in Q4 2012, but very low volume throughout 2013
• Corning: flexible OLED glass, Lotus glass updates
• Dupont: new materials and nozzle-printing updates
• HyeLCD: still making PMOLED panels
• FDC: flexible OLED displays on show
• Tianma: AMOLED prototypes, mass production only in 2014
• Fraunhofer: bi-directional OLED microdisplays
• OLED-A: OLED market forecasts

Samsung and LG already announced plans to start selling OLED TVs in 2012, but it seems that no one really knows how much they hope to sell in 2012. The actual question seems to be the capacity: how many panels will the two companies be able to produce until the year's end?

According to Digitimes, Samsung's internal target is to produce 200,000 panels in 2012 (in their 5.5-Gen fab). LGD will only be able to produce 50,000 panels.

DisplaySearch are much less optimistic. They estimate that both companies together will only be able to produce 20,000 panels as they still haven't overcome all the technical challenges.

AUO was supposed to start producing 4" to 5" AMOLED panels in Q2 2012, but new reports say that AUO's yields are still very low (less than 20%) and so they have delayed mass production to Q3 2012. The same reports suggest that AUO got orders for 4.3" qHD AMOLED panels from HTC and is likely to get orders from Nokia as well.

Finally ending speculations, Sony and Panasonic announced that they will jointly develop technologies for OLED TV panels mass production. The two companies will develop printing based technology, which will enable low-cost mass production. They plan to establish the technology during 2013, by integrating their unique technologies. They will also "study" collaboration of OLED mass production. The current plan is for each company to develop and commercialize its own OLED panels, but it's possible that they will also jointly produce the panels in the future.

Sony also announced this month that they developed a 9.9" 960x540 (111ppi) flexible OLED panel, using an Oxide-TFT (IGZO) backplane and a WOLED-CF architecture (RGBW). The thickness of this panel is only 110 um. The small-molecule OLED materials were deposited using vapor deposition. Unfortunately the company didn't demonstrate this panel at SID. Sony also presented a technical paper describing its offset printing technology which enables high resolution OLED panels. In fact Sony claims this technology could produce 500ppi OLED panels.

First-O-Lite has sent us an update regarding their OLED lighting R&D progress. The company have successfully developed a hybrid tandem WOLED lighting device, which features 77.2 lm/W and a CRI of 87.2 (@2090 cd/m2). The CIE is (0.46, 0.42).

The company's Gen-1 production line will be able to produce samples by the end of the year. They are also developing a Gen-2 production line (in a $40 million investment) that will be able to produce "large sized" panels by early 2013. The plan is to use the Gen-2 fab to make small-scale production for early market development.

After teasing us for almost a month, Philips finally launched their new modular 3D OLED system, the Livingscrulpture 3D. It's a kinetic system based on modular OLED blocks. The rectangular Lumiblade panels are placed on rods that can change their height - thus easily creating 3D surfaces. Philips told us that each base plate will cost about €700 (so that's about €43 per OLED panel). A square meter will cost about €7,000.

Philips also unveiled the new LivingShapes interactive mirror - a square installation that includes 64 (8x8) square panels and an "intelligent" sensor technology that detects the outline of the person looking at the mirror and switches off the OLEDs that are in the field of vision - thus turning it into a mirror. It's clever and beautiful, and will cost €1,500, which means you pay around €23 per OLED panel (even less if you consider all the other parts of the mirror) - which is actually very cheap for an OLED. It will ship in September.