Sony plans to launch a much larger version of its impressive OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) television within the next year, CEO Howard Stringer said Wednesday.

Sony launched its first OLED TV, an 11-inch model, in late 2007. The set, which also has the distinction of being the first commercial OLED TV in the world, won great acclaim thanks to the smoother, sharper and more richly colored images it offered over today’s LCD (liquid crystal display) and PDP (plasma display panel) technologies.

At the same time Sony began showing a prototype 27-inch OLED screen and last month in Tokyo showed an OLED screen that was just 0.3 millimeters thick. Stringer, speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference in Carlsbad, California, on Wednesday, introduced the thin prototype and talked about commercialization.

“This is 0.3 millimeters wide, it’s a glass, we can produce this in plastic and you can wrap it around your arm, we’re not quite sure why you would want to,” Stringer told Walt Mossberg, a columnist for the newspaper and co-host of the event. “We’re looking for applications for the next generation of the plastic version but this will come out in a 27-inch version fairly soon.”

“Within the next 12 months, we haven’t given a date,” he said when asked to be more specific on timing.

Stringer didn’t give much away when it came to pricing. The 11-inch model, which Sony calls the XEL-1, carries a relatively high price-tag of US$2,500.

“It’s a complicated process and obviously we are working very hard to find out how to mass-produce it but until then it’s very expensive,” said Stringer.

Stringer’s reference to a plastic OLED panel was to a prototype announced by the company in May 2007. Then it showed a small 2.5-inch OLED manufactured on a plastic substrate. The screen has a resolution of 160 pixels by 120 pixels and showed full-motion video while being bent and rolled.

Sony hasn’t announced any sales targets for its OLED televisions but said earlier this month that it plans to sell 17 million LCD televisions in the fiscal year from April. That’s a jump of about 7 million sets on the previous year. Sony hopes to achieve this by producing more models for the mid-market based on panels it will procure from Sharp. High-end sets will continue to feature panels produced by S-LCD, the LCD panel manufacturing joint venture it has with Samsung from:Electronics.http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/146419/sonys_stringer_promises_27inch_oled_tv_fairly_soon.html

DisplaySearch, a display-market research firm, has a report out on characterization of the active matrix OLED (AMOLED) technology in the Sony set and the news is not encouraging.

It turns out that the RGB architecture is very sensitive to the image, and it has a 5,000-hour lifetime for white and a 17,000-hour lifetime for the typical video image–well below the Sony’s published specifications, according to the report.

Moreover the panel suffers from differential aging: After 1,000 hours the blue luminance degraded by 12 percent, the red by 7 percent and the green by 8 percent, said the report.

Other key findings include:

The sub-pixel architecture includes two TFTs and two capacitors. The pixel architecture does not use a common support layer, as the materials and thickness are different. The micro cavity structure results in multiple reflection interference. The brightness is severely reduced in high-ambient conditions. The black levels are less than 0.01 cd/m, lower than any other display (PDP or LCD) currently on the market. The top emission design includes a color filter and a circular polarizer. The cathode is semi transparent. The design includes a unique approach to cooling the OLED.

from:http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207601176

DisplaySearch found that, after running a number of XEL-1 sets for 1,000 hours, there was a 12-percent degradation in blue luminance, a 7-percent in red an 8-percent in green. They then extrapolated the figures to reach their 17k hours estimate. They also found that brightness is severely reduced in high ambient conditions.

Perhaps more critical, they explain how the OLED display is inferior in multiple areas compared to current AMOLED designs. While they spin that out to say that customers are set to be even more impressed by future panels, it’s nonetheless a slight on Sony’s flagship OLED screen. Sony are denying their brightness figures are inaccurate.

from:http://www.slashgear.com/sony-oled-tv-to-lose-brightness-in-half-the-claimed-time-say-researchers-0811528.php

Sony has downplayed allegations that its state-of-the-art OLED TV, the XEL-1, has a fraction of the longevity the manufacturer claims it has.

Sony told Register Hardware that it stands by its statement that the XEL-1′s brightness drops to 50 per cent after 30,000 hours of usage, despite independent tests that showed the set’s average half-brightness time – a standard measure of display longevity – is closer to 17,000 hours.

The test was conducted by market watcher DisplaySearch. It told Register Hardware it ran two XEL-1s alongside each other for 1000 hours, one showing a plain white picture, the other video footage. From the inevitable dip in brightness, it calculated how long it would be before the luminance fell to 50 per cent.

Like all colour TVs, the XEL-1 colours its pixels by mixing different intensities of red, green and blue light. DisplaySearch found that, during the 1000-hour test period, the ability of the two screens to display blue had degraded by 12 per cent. A seven per cent drop was recorded for red and an eight per cent decline for green.

We asked Sony to respond. “Sony stands by its claim of the XEL-1 product’s average life to half-brightness of 30,000 hours,” came the reply.

Sony wouldn’t comment on DisplaySearch’s specific findings becuase the analyst “has not provided details on testing”. So perhaps the two companies should get together and share figures?

It’s well known that OLED displays have a shorter lifespan than LCD and plasma screens though, with the typical half-brightness lifespan of an LCD, for instance, being between 50,000 and 60,000 hours.

Those figures translate to 5.7 and 6.9 years, respectively. If that doesn’t seem long, bear in mind that the figures are for continuous use. In the real world, the amount of time that TVs are turned off or set on stand-by pushes the practical half-brightness lifetime out to several decades – much longer than the average time consumer keep the same set.

from:http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/05/13/displaysearch_sony_oled/

Samsung: OLED laptop in ‘09?

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At an industry display conference this week, Samsung will unveil a prototype laptop with a 12.1-inch active-matrix OLED (AMOLED) display.

If you have ever seen Sony’s XEL-1 11-inch OLED TV, then you know just how cool an OLED laptop could be. On the other hand, if you’ve seen the XEL-1’s price tag–$2,500–then you realize odds are we won’t see this laptop in 2009, even though several sites reported that Samsung may release commercial versions sometime next year.

OLEDs use light-emitting diodes (hence the name) made up of electroluminescent organic compounds to produce different colors. Because OLED displays do not require a backlight, they are thinner and use less power, and the images are bright, colorful, and visible at an angle. The disadvantages are that they have a shorter lifespan than LCDs, and currently are very costly to manufacture.

For a company that is a virtual unknown in laptops here in the U.S, Samsung has been making a lot of news lately. Last week, a company executive told journalists at an event in Seoul that Samsung needs to triple laptop shipments to 11 million units by 2011 (5.7% worldwide market share), or it would exit the business altogether. Samsung reportedly plans to expand sales by entering the already-crowded markets in U.S. and Europe. Samsung later stated that 11 million units was an “ambitious goal” but it had no plans to get out of laptops.

from:http://blogs.zdnet.com/computers/?p=172

Sony’s first OLED TV, the XEL-1, has gotten loads of favorable reviews and hype (from us too). It does put out a hell of a picture, one that made our Wilson proclaim: “you’re essentially staring into what could very well be the perfect TV.” But Gary over at HDGuru isn’t so swoony, and his more rigid (and far HD geekier) tests show some serious (though not fatal) flaws you should definitely know about, if you’re thinking about dropping $2,500 or are just an HD freak. Like, for instance, that it’s not nearly as bright as the best plasmas and LCDs.

Brightness is the major issue here (though green is more saturated than the HDTV standard, if you care). If you move off-axis by 45 degrees horizontally (think viewing angle) then the image brightness drops by a third. And even if you actually calibrate the settings to “produce an optimum image,” even on-axis, the best plasmas and LCDs are two-three times brighter (30-40 footlamberts vs. the XEL-1′s 16.4 ft footlamberts).

Making the problem worse, one of the set’s features is an auto-dimming circuit that slowly ratchets down the brightness (and contrast) within a minute of turning the set on (to around 7.8 footlamberts, way darker than “any calibrated plasma or LCD HDTV”). Sony says that it’s to reduce the chance of burn-in, but it’s more likely to help extend the set’s life, which was discovered recently to only be half as long as it’s rated for.

All that said, the picture quality remains “more breathtaking than its price,” but you might wanna keep it in a dark room. [HD Guru]

from:http://gizmodo.com/391668/hype-buster-sony-xel+1-oled-not-the-perfect-tv-were-not-talking-bout-size-either

Stringer didn’t go into great detail only saying that Sony would have a 27-inch OLED TV on the market by May 2009. The rub is that Stringer is already preparing consumers for sticker shock by calling it expensive. Sony didn’t even call the XEL-1 expensive and it was by all accounts.

If we have some fun with the XEL-1 and get a price per inch for the 11-inch screen by dividing the cost by screen size we get a bit over $227 per inch of screen space. If we apply that figure to the 27-inch OLED screen we get over $6100. I’m betting the sets come in at more than that.

from:http://uk.i4u.com/article17668.html

Among the worthies appearing onstage at the D6 conference Wednesday morning: Sony CEO Howard Stringer. Among the things he’ll be talking about, we’re told: Sony’s newish OLED TVs — its line of super-thin screens built using organic light-emitting diodes.

We’re not the sort of people who can tell you exactly what an organic light-emitting diode is, or why it allows Sony to build super-thin screens. But we can tell you just exactly how thin the model we’ll be seeing tomorrow is: .3 millimeters.

This will be the first time Sony has shown off its super duper-thin screen in the U.S. We’re not sure how Sir Howard will be able to demonstrate how thin his new screen really is — he’ll be standing on a stage, after all, and by definition this is the kind of thing you need to see up close. But we can give you a sense of what .3 millimeters looks like in practical terms: The same thickness as a playing card. from:http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/sneak_peek_sony_s_ultra_thin_oled