LG's and Samsung's curved OLED TVs finally arrive in the US. LG Electronics announced that their curved 55" OLED TV is now shipping, exclusively through Magnolia stores inside Best Buy. The 55EA9800 costs $14,999 (in South Korea it costs around $13,500) and it is currently on display in Best Buy's store in Richfeld, Minnesota.

In the following weeks more stores will display and sell the OLED TV (in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston, Dallas, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and San Antonio) and later on more stores will offer it. According to Pocket Lint, LG's TV is "jaw-droppingly stunning".

According to Reports, Samsung is also set to launch their own curved 55" OLED TV, the KN55S9 in the US within a few days. Samsung's TV will also cost $14,999 (yes, the same price as LG's TV). One dealer, New York's Value Electronics confirmed that its shipment is already on the way.

While Samsung and LG's TV look quite similar on the outside, the technology is quite different. LG is using an Oxide-TFT backplane and a WRGB (white OLEDs with color filters) architecture. Samsung's TV uses an LTPS backplane and direct-emission OLEDs (no color filters, RGB sub-pixels). It'll be interested to see expert reviews on these two TVs.

Samsung launched the GS4 towards the end of May. It took them less than a month to ship 10 million units, and reports say that it took them just over two months to reach 20 million. This sounds impressive, but actually Samsung is disappointing investors. The company announced their financial results for Q2 2013, and while the company generated revenues of $51.5 billion and a net profit of $6.96 billion, they also reported that smartphone growth is slowing - mostly GS4 sales.

But there are some good news for the OLED market in Samsung's financial report. First of all, Samsung is reporting positive growth for OLED displays for high-end smartphones, and they expect this growth to be maintained in the second half of 2013. Samsung will focus on offering "differentiated smartphone displays" using new technologies such as flexible displays. They will also focus on enhancing OLED cost competitiveness and will expand the OLED product line-up and feature more sizes and high resolution displays.

LG Display reported their financial results for Q2 2013 - revenues decreased slightly to $5.8 billion and net income was $93 million. Overall this was a good report. Regarding OLEDs, LG still sees OLED as their ultimate differentiated products and they will continue to focus on obtaining on OLED business space that would generate profit from this business as early as possible. About 80% of LGD's CapEx in 2013 will go towards OLED and LTPS and other "advanced display effects".

LG's OLED TV yields are continually improving and the setting up of the 2nd OLED fab (M2) has been carried out on schedule. They still aim to start mass-scale production (26,000 monthly Gen-8 substrates) in the middle of 2014, but exact ramping-up hasn't been decided yet as it depends on yield improvements. They will give more details hopefully in the first half of 2014. LG also said that they will start production of plastic-based OLEDs in the middle of the second half of 2013, as was announced before.

In a different release, LG Display restated their commitment to OLED as the future display technology: "what is crystal clear, is that LG Display, from the beginning, has made a commitment to fulfilling the potential of OLED and stayed true to it". LG says that "certain industry players" (i.e. Samsung. They won't say it per se, but they did link to Samsung related news) are sending different messages and causing confusion: they continue to tout OLED and release new products but they also "downplay their once strong commitment".

Since CMEL stopped producing AMOLEDs in 2009, it was impossible to get low-volume AMOLED panels as Samsung and LG will only ship to large-volume applications (mobile phones, cameras, etc). But today Densitron informed us that they started shipping new HVGA (320x480) 3.5" a-Si AMOLEDs panels. The DLA320480AB035F module features 10,000:1 contrast ratio, near 180-degree viewing angle and a brightness of over 200 Candela. It uses Himax's HX5227-A AMOLED driver and includes a MIPI-DBI 8/16/24 bit MPU parallel interface.

Densitron told me that these displays use Ignis Innovation's a-Si compensation technology. Using an a-Si backplane should make these panels cheaper compared to panels made on LTPS or Oxide-TFT. Densitron wouldn't reveal who is actually producing those panels.

Audi, Philips, Automotive Lighting, Merck and the University of Cologne successfully concluded an OLED research project (called OLED 3D), and developed the world's first large-area 3D OLED car rear lighting panels and installed a prototype on an Audi TT. A 3D OLED means that the OLEDs have a curved surface - not just in one direction. These are glass based panels. It's not flexible glass (like Corning's Willow glass), it's the regular glass Philips are using in their regular OLEDs, but curved. The material used (made by Merck) are soluble, and the production process is described as "web printing".

Those OLEDs are transparent (in some parts), and Audi stacked several of them over each other, which makes for a unique impressions of light emerging from within. As part of this German-funded (€5.7 million) project, the partners developed new crosslinkable red OLED materials which enabled producing soluble OLEDs in multiple layers on formed glass using "wet chemistry". Philips also produced the actual panel prototypes. They had to adapt their production process for the 3D OLEDs, mainly the glass substrate production and the vacuum OLED deposition, encapsulation and electrical contacting.

A few weeks ago Universal Display changed their ticker symbol from PANL to OLED. This may be good for UDC's business, but it made a mess with the popular Yahoo's investor forum. So OLED-Info comes to the rescue (sort of) - and we launched new investor forums - for UDC and eMagin investors.

To access the forums, simply use this link. Anyone can read the posts and replies If you want to post and comment, you'll have to register as an OLED-Info user which you can do here.