Sony this week came out with a TV based on an OLED display, which will be on the market by Christmas. Sony has long believed that OLED will be the successor technology to LCD displays for the modern TV set. Organic Light Emitting Diodes have been delivered into small devices since 2004, and Samsung, TPO, LG Philips and Casio all have strong market share in OLEDs for small devices such as handsets, MP3s, automotive consoles and digital cameras, but none so far have come up with a TV set that can be made for the right price and previously Sony, although in the market, was known to be obsessed with bringing the technology to TV sets, a feat it now says it has managed.
Initially Sony will only be offering an 11 inch TV screen, which will be superseded by a 27 inch device which is in prototype, and then the technology will be used widely in an attempt to re-establish Sony’s pre-eminence in the TV global market. Already Bravia TV sets, which use LCD panels from the joint LCD manufacturing plant that Samsung set up in Korea with Sony money, offer a better picture than any high definition device on the market, but remain just that bit more expensive than Samsung’s own LCD TV sets, which has allowed Samsung to overtake the recent leads of Sony in this market.
The picture taken from the side of the new product, the Xel-1, (above) shows just how thin the screen itself is (3mm), and despite having only an 11 inch screen can accept HD 1080p resolution input, will not blur even during fast action scenes due to switching up to 1,000 times faster than LCD, and has a contrast ratio of an astonishing 1 million to 1. It weights just 2 kilograms, measures 287 ‘ 140 ‘ 253mm, has 960 x 450 pixels, connects using USB, Ethernet, and HDMI and uses just 45W of power. It will go on sales in Japan on December 1, at $1,743.
If Sony comes to dominate larger screen OLED technologies, including cheap manufacture, it could build the kind of stranglehold on TV sets that its old Trinitron CRT design gave it, in what is rapidly becoming a $100 billion annual flat screen market.
OLEDs have the potential to be made cheaper than LCDs. They do not use a backlit display, run on far less electricity, are more robust than LCDs because they don’t rely on glass substrates, and can refresh far more rapidly. The market anticipates that OLED TVs will end up cheaper to build, look more elegant because they can be far thinner, offer greater colors and contrasts, while using 40% less power. The devices also have the same viewing angle as a CRT, more or less from any angle, which is a big strength over LCD designs. However the current design of the OLED TV will last only 30,000 hours, about 10 years for someone using the TV eight hours a day which is currently less than LCD TVs, but better than plasma.
Eventually OLED displays could even be bendable or foldable, like a news paper, a technology area where Philips is known to be working.
Sony got caught out by the flat TV screen market back in 2003 when it had too much of an aging CRT business on its hands, no scale in LCD screen manufacture and it confessed that it would be a further three to four years before its successor technology was ready. That forced it into a deal with Samsung, announced in March 2004 as S-LCD, a joint venture company costing Sony a large share of the $2 billion the plant cost to build, and guaranteeing a rival a market lead.
That factory made state of the art 7th generation amorphous TFT LCD panels, and took about a year to come on stream and on the back of it both Sony and Samsung have dominated TV supply in the 30 inch to 42 inch markets. But as far as we know Sony will not be duty bound to share this breakthrough OLED manufacturing process with Samsung, but might well feel that it is in a position to turn the tables.
Samsung itself showed a 40 inch OLED TV at a show during 2005, but has not been able to economically manufacture anywhere near that size for mass produced TV sets.
Revenues in this screen sector have been growing at over 100%, a year with Active Matrix OLED displays being the technology of choice. AMOLEDs have full layers of cathode, organic molecules and anode, with the anode layer overlaying a thin film transistor array in a matrix, which constitutes the circuitry which fires electric current to emerge as light from the screen.
The OLED works by applying an electrical current from a cathode to an anode across multiple layers of organic materials, which are something like plastics to work with. The anode removes electrons from a conductive layer of organic molecules and at the boundary between that and an emissive layer, electrons are freed through tiny holes. When an electron finds an electron hole, the electron fills the hole and gives up energy in the form of light.
The trick is to find processes such as using ink jets to spray the conductive layers on, which drive down the manufacturing costs, but this is all reliant on a clean room environment.
Since the crash of Sony during 2003, and its well publicized problem in flat TV manufacture, LCDs have risen and risen in popularity, with Plasma Display Panels sustaining their leads at the very top end of the market and rear-projection TV screens, with their cumbersome look taking the bottom end of the price in TV markets. CRT TVs have fallen to small minority of mostly third world markets, with China being the largest consumer of CRT TV sets.
And in that time multiple technologies have promised to take the stage and challenge LCD’s dominance. In 2005 Motorola revealed it had a breakthrough technology for large flat TV screens, in the form of a method for growing carbon nanotubes, used to create mini CRTs between two sheets of glass, which it tried to sign licenses for. Motorola said this would lead to screens of a similar thickness to the new Sony device but they have not emerged. US company Nano-Proprietary, also began trying to license its processes for growing carbon nanotubes and cut a deal with Japan’s Mitsui and a Taiwanese manufacturing partner Da Ling corporation, and claims over 200 patents or patent applications pending in this field.
During 2005 Canon and Toshiba began an alliance during which they spent nearly $2 billion trying to perfect the technology behind Surface Emitter Conduction electron-emitter display panels (SED) and got as far as showing a prototype with an exceptionally bright screen and a black-and-white contrast ratio of 5,000:1, which although high, will no longer touch the new Sony device.
Mid-way through 2006 Canon and Toshiba hit problems and began delaying the launch citing manufacturing hurdles, and now it has been beaten to market by a technology which looks to be superior.
SED panels were supposed to go into manufacture in the middle of 2007, with a shipping price from the factory of something like $600, and the potential to begin at 30 inches and rise up to 50 inch devices straight away. Those devices would have been around 1 inch thick.
What has really happened is that there has been a bloodbath in the pricing for LCD screens. Every player in the 2004 time frame doubled or trebled capacity and said they would increase market share, and new entrants also joined ‘ the result was a price crash which stimulated the market further and led to yet more investment and a greater price spiral. The Canon Toshiba strategy of coming in at the top end of the market relied on prices not falling quite that fast, and it would have come to market at too high a price.
The common consent in 2003/4 was that 2005 would be a 15 million unit market for flat TVs, when instead the market went to 21 million in 2005 and LCDs alone passed the 42 million unit market by the end of 2006 with Plasma still controlling the top end with another 6 million or so devices.
So every company that was trying to design the next generation devices needed to keep up with the falling price of LCD manufacture while also staying ahead in quality terms. The only viable strategy was to establish a revenue base at the low end, which has happened for OLED, so that investment is supported by revenues, and not just become an R&D black hole.
Going forward, Sony says it will progressively develop its OLED TV business, positioning it alongside Bravia. It first began researching organic luminescent materials in 1994, entered mass production of small sized, full-color OLED panels in 2004 and says it has accumulated numerous related core technologies, such as its Super Top Emission panel technology which enhances the brightness and color reproduction capability of OLED panels, as well as manufacturing technologies gained from Sony’s experience of mass producing small sized OLED panels. Mass production has now begun on the 11 inch organic panel, which is used in the XEL-1, although at first production is only set for just 2,000 units a month.
Sony shares are sharply up this week, but with a new cheaper PSP, rumors about price cuts on the PS3, fluctuations in the success of Blu-ray in its fight against rival HD DVD technology, and the high price of the floatation of its financial subsidiary, you can never quite be sure why on any given week.
Our take though is that Sony is ahead in OLED, and owns many of the patents here, and that this is the death knell for LCD technology, but it will take some 6 to 7 years before OLED advantages over LCD are fully exploited. However expect all of those participants at the low end of the market such as Samsung and LG Philips to make their own moves into OLED TV as soon as they are able.