During November 2014, LG continued its OLED TV push. The company reported that it sold over 1,000 OLED TVs in Korea in October - more than what they sold in the whole of 2013 (in fact, sales have increased twenty-fold compared to 2013). In the UK, LG launched a £3 million ($4.7 million USD) UK marketing campaign for its OLED TVs, while in the US Amazon started offering the company's 65" 4K OLED TV for $9,999 - although it is not shipping from Amazon, and there's no estimated shipping date yet.

TPVision (who owns the Philips brand for TVs) has been working on OLED TVs for a long time (we first reported on this in 2012), and now the company announced its plans to launch a Philips OLED TV in 2015. The company uses OLED panels supplied by LG Display (which also supplies OLEDs to Panasonic, Grundig, Changhong and Skyworth. And maybe Sony, too). TPVision already showed a prototype OLED TV, but the company is not ready to release the TV yet.

LG's arch-rival Samsung, is still not ready to release OLED TVs, and Samsung Electronics' TV chief, Kim Hyun-seok, says that Samsung will not release any OLED TVs in 2014 or in 2015. Samsung will focus on UHD TVs, and also may release Quantum-Dots enhanced LCDs next year.

China's EverDisplay (EDO) started mass producing AMOLED displays - the first Chinese company to do so. EDO currently has the capacity to produce 600,000 5" AMOLED panels each month, and plans to increase production to a million panel per month by the end of 2014. EDO already secured their first OLED customer, a Chinese handset maker (the first phone to use EDO's OLEDs will launch by the end of 2014).

EDO has a 4.5-Gen LTPS fab, with a maximum capacity of 15,000 substrates each month. EDO will also start making larger panels (5.6", FHD) in February 2015 and smaller 1.63" 320x320 ones in Q2 2015. In July 2014 we published an interview with EverDisplay's marketing team.

LG Display posted an interesting article explaining their plastic-based flexible OLED technologies and displays - showing how these displays are better than LCD displays in several aspects (mainly the fact that plastic OLEDs are thinner than LCDs and glass-based OLEDs). In addition, LG Display posted their flexible OLED roadmap:

LG already produces flexible OLEDs for phones and wearable devices. In 2015-2016 the company sees flexible OLEDs being adopted in tablets and bendable phones. From 2017, LGD sees flexible OLEDs being used to produce foldable and rollable devices. LG also aims to produce rollable TVs in 2017. In July 2014, the company unveiled a 18" flexible OLED prototype panel. LG is still confident that it will be able to develop a 60" UHD flexible and transparent OLED by 2017.

Samsung is not yet ready release new OLED TVs, but the company is accelerating its small/medium and flexible OLED development. First up we have Samsung Electronics, which announced that flexible OLEDs is one of three businesses areas it will focus on for future growth. Samsung Display, meanwhile, aims to increase its flexible OLED display capacity to reach 30,000 to 40,000 monthly substrates (up from 8,000 today). A few months ago the company confirmed that it is constructing a new 6-Gen (1850x1500 mm) fab that will be dedicated to flexible OLED production.

One of the OLED products Samsung plans to release towards the end of 2015 is a foldable OLED phone. The company showed new foldable OLED prototypes - a 5.5" (WQXGA, 2048x1526, 464 PPI) panel that folds in half and a 10" tri-foldable AMOLED (Full-HD, 218 PPI). Both prototypes have a radius of curvature of 5 mm, better than the Galaxy Note Edge that has a curvature of 7 mm, and a huge improvement over earlier flexible OLEDs - the Galaxy Round's 400 mm and the Gear Fit's 57 mm. SDC goal is to reach a radius of 1 mm, and they aim to achieve that within two years.

But it's not all about flexible OLEDs. Samsung says that regular small-sized OLEDs can be made cheaper than LCDs (as OLEDs do not require backlighting, color filters and polarizers), and the technology is now ready to compete head to head with LCD technology. The company is reportedly pushing suppliers to lower prices in order to make OLEDs cheaper than LCDs, and is also aiming to increase production efficiency via better process technologies.

SDC is also showing transparent OLED prototypes, one 30" panel that is the world's largest transparent OLED ever on display (surpassing LG Display's 18" one shown in July) and a smaller 14" (Samsung showed a 14" transparent OLED laptop prototype back in 2010, but never produced any commercial transparent OLEDs). Samsung did not detail any plans to commercialize these displays. One display that is reportedly on its way is a 5.9" UHD (746 PPI) one for the Galaxy Note 5.

Meanwhile, Samsung's existing flexible OLED products are entering the US market - AT&T started offering the Note Edge with its flexible curved OLED display with a $100 premium over the Note 4, and the Gear S is also shipping in the US, unlocked for $355 or for $200 with an AT&T contract.

Acuity Brands have been developing OLED luminaries since 2010, and have released several models commercially. Now Home Depot started offering some of the companies smaller OLED luminaries, with prices starting at $199 for the Aedan 2-panel lamp. This is exciting as these are the cheapest OLED luminaries ever on offer, and these are the first OLED lamps ever to be offered in such a retail channel.

Acuity Brands are using LG Chem OLEDs in all their luminaires, and they consider OLED to be the "perfect light source". In May 2014 we posted an interview with the company's OLED business group Director of Business Development & Marketing.

Kateeva unveiled a new mass production flexible OLED thin film encapsulation (TFE) system based on their ink-jet technology. The YIELDjet FLEX can enable cost-effective encapsulation deposition, and Kateeva says that the first mass-production system will ship to a customer in Asia later this month. This customer is probably Samsung Display (which recently invested in Kateeva), but this is not confirmed.

Kateeva says that inkjet printing enables superb particle performance, high efficiency and excellent scalability. The YIELDjet system is enclosed in a pure-nitrogen chamber, which is the best OLED processing environment, shielding the OLED materials from moisture and air. The ink-jet system provides exceptional planarization of substrate surface structures and particles and results in unprecedented film uniformity.

Samsung is currently using Vitex's multilayer thin-film encapsulation (TFE) using three layers (this is a new achievement, up until now they had to use at least 6 layers). While Samsung will still use this technology for its current displays, they are also considering other encapsulation deposition technologies (such as Veeco's FAST-ALD and Universal Display's UniversalBarrier). But if SDC is indeed Kateeva's customer, this is their first mass-production next-gen encapsulation technology.

We discussed this new technology and Kateeva's other ink jet efforts with the company's president.