LG continues its OLED TV drive. On March 13, LG Electronics introduced their 2014 TV lineup in Korea - unveiling a total of 68 new models. The company will launch 77", 65" and 55" OLED TVs - some of which will feature 4K UHD resolution. The company did not yet announce prices and availability, but they did say that they will also launch the OLED TVs in other key markets.

In the US, Amazon now lists LG's 55" curved Full-HD 55EA9800 for $5,999. That's quite a drop from the original $14,999 price in August 2013. In fact, you can find the OLED TV at an even cheaper price on ebay - you'll find several sellers offering a brand new OLED TV (still in its original package) - for as low as $4,380. A couple of weeks ago, Amazon also started offering LG's flat GALLERY OLED TV (the 55EA8800) - for $7,499.

LG Display is also offering its OLED TV panels to other companies. On March 28 China's Skyworth announced it started to mass produce the Tianchi E980 OLED TV which uses LG Display's 55" curved Full-HD WRGB panel.

If you're wondering why LG is so keen on curved OLED TVs then you're not alone. LG Display published an article that explains the advantages of curved TV. According to LG, a curved TV can enhance the viewer’s immersive experience, it offers a less distorted image and the screen feels larger and brighter compared to a flat TV.

During March Konica Minolta announced dramatic news - the company is starting to construct an OLED lighting fab that will mass produce flexible OLED lighting panels on plastic substrates. The construction will end in the summer of 2014 and mass production will commence in the fall of 2014. Konica will invest ¥10 billion (almost $100 million) in the new fab that will use a roll-to-roll production method and will have a capacity of a million panels per month.

Konica's fab will produce both white and color-tunable flexible panels. The white panel will be 150x60 mm in size, 0.35 mm thick and will weight 5 grams. Konica's fab will not only be the first real mass production OLED panel plant, but it will also make color tunable and flexible panels. Hopefully this will push other companies (such as LG Chem, Philips, OSRAM and others) to step up their OLED investments as well.

In a separate release, Konica also announced that it developed the world's most efficient OLED lighting panel - at 131 lm/W. The panel's emitting area is 15 square centimeters. KM says that now OLEDs are actually more efficient than consumer LEDs, and this is a major step forward for OLED lighting. We do not know the lifetime or any other features of this panel. Konica incorporated three new technologies that enabled them to reach this record efficiency.

Last month Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S5 with its 5.1" FHD (432 PPI) Super AMOLED display. The phone is set to launch globally on April 11th, but my friend Raymond Soneira from DisplayMate received a GS5 from Samsung to test the display. And his conclusions? The GS5's display is a major improvement over the GS4 display. In fact, the GS5's AMOLED is the best mobile display ever tested at DisplayMate, outperforming all other OLED and LCD displays.

But just how is the display better than the 5" Full-HD one on the GS4 and every other mobile display on the market? DisplayMate says that the new display is features the highest brightness, the lowest reflectance, the highest color accuracy, the highest contrast rating in ambient light and the smallest brightness variation with viewing angle. The GS5's display is also more efficient than the GS4 by 27%! Read more on DisplayMate's GS5 tests here.

Pioneer announced that they began to mass produce OLED lighting panels made with a "wet coating system". Pioneer developed those 76x76 (active area) panels together with Mitsubishi Chemical. We do not have a lot of technical information but the two companies estimated earlier that their new process will reduce the OLED panel cost by 90%.

According to some reports, Pioneer's capacity is about 40,000 panels per month. This is a far cry from Konica's announced mass production fab (see above) but if Pioneer can indeed get the cost down by 90% it may be very interesting.

Sumitomo Chemical announced it will exhibit its latest polymer OLED (P-OLED) lighting at the Light+Building 2014 event next month. Sumitomo says that they will start marketing those panels later in April 2014. The panels will be low-cost (due to the advanced printing process) and will be available in a wide range of lighting colors.

LG Chem announced the world's largest OLED lighting panel at 320x320 mm (and it's only 1 mm thick!). The N6SD30 features 60 lm/W, 850 lumens brightness (max 1,000), a high CRI (>90) and a color temperature of 3000K. LG Chem will unveil this panel for the first time next week at the Light + Building 2014 conference. The company is already shipping samples (available on request).

This is by far the largest OLED on the market, much larger than LG Chem's own N6BB (320x110 mm). Other OLED makers only make 140x140 panels, so LG's panel is over give times larger. The largest OLED lighting panel ever fabricated was a 330x330 mm panel produced by the OLED100.eu project back in 2011 - but that was just a prototype.

Panasonic is reportedly going to withdraw from the OLED lighting market. The Japanese company cannot see earnings coming from this operation due to the high cost of production. Panasonic Idemitsu OLED lighting (established in 2011 with Idemitsu Kosan) will be dissolved. Panasonic will turn all of its focus into LED lighting.

This is sad news and a bit of surprise as only a few weeks ago Panasonic demonstrated three new OLED lighting panels at a LED trade show in Tokyo, including the company's first flexible OLEDs. On the other hand, In December 2013 Panasonic also canceled their OLED TV joint development with Sony. So perhaps it makes sense for Panasonic to withdraw from OLEDs altogether.

PIOL started OLED lighting panel production in August 2011. The company currently offers OLED panels that are 97x90 mm in size (2 mm thick) with a luminance of 3,100 cd/m2, a lifetime of 10,000 hours (LT70) and an efficiency if 26-30 lm/W. PIOL panels have a high CRI (over 90) and they mostly target museums and exhibitions. Panasonic made panels have already been used in at least two museums: Kyoto's MOMAK museum and Panasonic's own Shiodome museum.

The Polish Academy of Sciences is hosting a summer school in Poland focused on Lanthanide-based photonic materials and structures. This is the 16th Krutyn summer school that will relate to breakthrough applications and cutting edge systems based on Lanthanide materials.

This week long event (August 31 to September 6) is conceived as a high-level and highly intensive scientific event focusing on cutting-edge know-how on inorganic and organic aspects of advanced luminescent materials based on lanthanide compounds. This Summer School aims at the state-of-the-art training in the form of lectures and consulting sessions designed for Ph.D. students and young researchers seeking to reinforce their knowledge and skills in the field of inorganic and organic aspects of advanced luminescent. You can find more information here.

The kinds folks at LG Electronics and Israeli carrier Orange sent me an LG G Flex mobile phone for a review. For a week or so I left my GS4 behind and used this unique curved phone with its 6-inch 720p plastic-based flexible OLED display. Read my short hands-on review here.

Last month Huawei unveiled their TalkBand B1 smart wearable device. It was reported that the display is a 1.4" white flexible (curved) OLED. Now Huawei posted the full specification of the TalkBand, and it turns out that the display is indeed a curved OLED. It is a 1.4" 128x16 PMOLED panel made by Futaba. This is Futaba's film OLED, and it's probably the first device to use those curved (flexible) panels.

Towards the end of 2013, Futaba indeed said they finished development of those panels. It's great to finally see flexible PMOLEDs on the market. TDK Micro (later bought by Futaba) has been showing flexible PMOLEDs since 2010, but it took them almost four years to actually produce those panels.

Researchers from Kyushu University (led by Chihaya Adachi) developed a highly efficient blue OLED TADF (Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence) emitter that achieves almost 20% external quantum efficiency - similar to the best blue phosphorescent emitters.

TADF OLEDs are free from the heavy metals used in phosphorescent emitters and so they could be cheaper and better for the environment. The main problem with blue phosphorescent OLEDs is the short lifetime which still makes it impossible to use them in commercial applications. The new TADF blue OLEDs has about the same lifetime as the blue PHOLEDs, but researchers are hopeful that it will be easier to improve the lifetime of the TADF emitters.

TADF based OLEDs are also being commercialized by Cynora (based on copper) - and this is not related to the research being performed at Kyushu University. Read more about this interesting and promising research breakthrough here.