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The Consumer Electronics Show is taking place in Las Vegas this week and, as usual, vendors are showing off televisions made from Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED). It’s as predictable as a celebrity appearance by a Star Trek veteran.
LG and Samsung both showed off 55-inch OLED TVs due later in 2012. The screens are only a few millimeters thick and provide astounding color contrast and clarity. Granted, the TVs might cost $8,000 when they hit Best Buy, but both South Korean vendors, who truly set the agenda for the TV industry, say these are real products that will come out.
“The most exciting TVs at the show from both a design and picture quality standpoint are the two 55-inch OLED TVs announced by LG and Samsung,” David Katzmaier, who oversees TV coverage for CNET, tells me. “Their prices will be astronomical by LCD and plasma standards, but their images are clearly better and they can be as thin as five millimeters. They seem like disembodied images in person.”
Here are seven real reasons why OLED TVs will be a big deal in a few years.
1. The Manufacturing Technology Steadily Improves. OLEDs are essentially transparent sheets of plastic that give off light when zapped with little bit of electricity. This partly explains why they are energy efficient and thin. The problem has been making large OLEDs. Samsung and many others have inserted OLED screens into cell phones, but not in notebook, tablets or TVs much because the manufacturing yields on the large panels has been terrible.
It is also difficult to keep moisture out of OLED panels, raising the specter of customer backlash.
The 55-inch TVs underscore the steady progress on the tool sets required to produce large OLEDs. A good portion of this work is being performed in-house, but third parties have also come up with tool ideas. A start-up called Kateeva (read first story ever on them here) is working on a tool that creates large OLEDs with something akin to ink jet printer nozzles.
2. OLEDs Are Actually Not Late. I asked a number of companies—Panasonic, Toshiba, Hitachi—at CES in 2008 when we might start seeing OLED TVs priced for the mainstream. 2015 nearly all of them said. So the industry has three years to whack the price of the $8,000 TVs coming out in the second half. Three years: that’s nearly two cycles of Moore’s Law. Going by the usual rules of thumb, that means manufacturers might be able to pop out $2,000 55-inch OLED TVs for the 2015 holidays. Crazier things have happened.
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