August has been a busy month for OLED TVs, lead by LG of course. First of all, the company started shipping their new curved 55-inch FHD OLED TV (the 55EC9300) in the US for $3,499. Best Buy is showing the new TV in over 1,000 stores in the US. The 2013 55" FHD curved OLED TV model, the 55EA980 now costs less than $3,000 - as some retailers are probably looking to get rid of the old model TVs.

LG Electronics also officially started accepting pre-orders for the world's first 4K OLED TV in Korea, with two models - the 77" 77EG9700 and the 65" 65EC9700. The 65" model costs 12 million Won in Korea ($11,700), the price for the 77" model was not disclosed. Those TVs will soon arrive in Europe and the US, with the 65" model's price in the UK set at £5,999 (just over $10,000), and price in the US will reportedly be $6,999.

LG is very optimistic regarding OLED TVs, and one executive was quoted saying that "OLED TVs are expected to overtake LCD in sales within a few years". LG says that they now ship more OLED TVs in a month then they did in the whole of 2013. The production volume is still small (probably a few thousand units each month) but it is expected to grow soon.

Samsung is far less aggressive with OLED TVs. In fact, SDC's CEO, Park Dong-gun, said that the time is not yet ripe for OLED TV panel investment. While Samsung already have the related production and infrastructure technology to produce OLED TVs, they are still waiting for decisions at Samsung Electronics. A report from Korea suggests that Samsung will show a Quantum-Dots enhanced LCD next week, with aims to commercialize those panels very soon.

Taiwan's AU Optronics has been struggling with AMOLED production for years now, but finally the company started mass production of two AMOLED panels: a 1.63" 320x320 panel for wearable devices (smart watches), a 4.3" 480x272 panel and a 4.97" 1280x720 panel. Towards the end of 2014, AUO will also release a 5.46" Full-HD panel.

This is great news for the OLED industry and for everyone who wants to adopt AMOLEDs in their products. Please contact us if you want to find a supplier for these OLEDs.

AU Optronics is producing those new panels at their AFPD Gen-4.5 LTPS fab in Singapore that has been converted to AMOLED production. It's not clear what the company's capacity is at the moment, but I understand they can already produce over a million 1.63" panels and over 150,000 of the 4.3" panels per month. AUO's board recently approved $100 million in funding for the AFPD OLED fab.

Both Samsung and LG Electronics pre-announced their new smart watch devices before the IFA trade show, and both of these watches use flexible OLED panels.

So first up is the beautiful LG G Watch R (shown above) - a circular Android Wear smartwatch that use a 1.3" 320x320 (348 PPI) plastic (flexible) OLED panel. The G Watch R will launch in "early Q4 2014".

It's not clear why LG needed a flexible OLED as it is not bendable or even curved. Of course a plastic-OLED is thinner, lighter and more durable than a glass-based OLED. But maybe the real reason is that they simply wanted to use an in-house OLED and the only small OLEDs that LG Display produce at the moment are plastic based.

Samsung's Gear S is the company's sixth (!) smart watch released in the past year. This is a Tizen-based device that includes a stand-alone 3G modem, so it does not need to pair with a smartphone. It has a 2" 360x480 (300 PPI) plastic-based flexible/curved Super AMOLED display. The Gear S will ship in October 2014.

It's great to see those two very nice looking smartwatches - both with flexible OLED panels. It's interesting to see how the design of smart watches is advancing with each iteration. Of course everybody is waiting to see whether Apple will unveil their own smartwatch soon (hopefully with a flexible OLED too) and really define the new category. Apple may reveal the smartwatch in their upcoming event on September 9th.

Motorola's Moto 360, by the way, uses an LCD and not an OLED...

When Samsung launched the Galaxy S5, DisplayMate tested the new display (a 5.1" FHD, 432 PPI, Super AMOLED) and found it to not only be the best mobile display ever tested at Displaymate, but also 27% more efficient than the 5" Full-HD one on the GS4. Samsung told DisplayMate that the improvement mostly came from more efficient OLED materials, but they never told us which materials exactly.

During a recent investors conference, Universal Display revealed that the GS5 uses their new red emitter material, and the company says that "Samsung attributes the increase in power efficiency" to the new emitter. This is rather surprising, but the truth may be that the 27% efficiency boost resulted from several new materials, one of them being the new red emitter. SDC's newest panel, the 5.1" QHD AMOLED may be even more efficient than the GS5 FHD panel - which may mean even newer, more efficient, materials were adopted. OLED technology sure advances very rapidly...

TCL Group announced that it is going to raise 5.7 billion RMB ($926 million) in a private placement (there will be 10 different investors) to build CSOT's T2 8.5-Gen fab. This fab will use Oxide-TFT substrates and will produce both LCDs and AMOLEDs. The company filed information which specifically mentioned that this fab is important due for the future OLED technology. This is probably just the first production line, as earlier estimates for the cost of this fab were over $4 billion.

In addition to this upcoming 8.5-Gen, CSOT is also building a 6-Gen display fab in a 16 billion RMB ($2.5 billion) investment. CSOT expects to start mass production in the 6-Gen fab by 2016.

OLED displays are already mass produced for mobile phones and tablets, and OLED TV panels are also entering the market - in 55", 65" and even 77" TVs. but what about OLED monitors and OLED laptop displays? In this article, we discuss why these haven't been launched yet and what are the chances that we'll see an OLED laptop soon.

Read more here

During Samsung's conference call discussing their Q2 2014 results, Samsung released some interesting updates regarding SDC's upcoming A3 AMOLED fab. The A3 has a 6-Gen (1850x1500) production line that is used exclusively for flexible OLED production. While earlier reports from Korea suggested thatSDC started ordering equipment and aims to start production in Q1 2015, up until now we had no official confirmation.

Anyway, during the conference call, SDC's VP of planning Lee Chow Hun confirmed that the A3 will be used to produce flexible OLEDs, and that SDC aims to start operation during the first half of 2015. The pace of the ramp-up actually depends on the "market situation" (Apple, perhaps?). It was estimated that the investment required for the new fab will total $3 to $5 billion. The first production line will cost around $2 billion, and SDC has not yet committed to further expansion, they will away market confirmation.