Our investment analyst partner in the US, JRPG, and in particular analyst Jamie Townsend, had a couple of points to make about our coverage of the first Active Matrix OLED TV screens, that came out of Sony a few weeks back.
Townsend points out that many research figures for OLED include numbers for Passive Matrix OLED as well as Active Matrix OLEDs including the Display Search numbers for Q2 which we also quoted.
AMOLED small displays from Samsung SDI, Kodak and eMagin totaled 1.4 million units which is almost nothing in the small display market. The bulk of those are coming from Samsung SDI which is just now ramping up to a target of 10 million a month. So we should be seeing a big surge shortly in AMOLED screens for handsets, MP3 players and the like, complete with the massive gains in resolution and contrast they bring, and lower power consumption.
Sell through of AMOLED products are still in their infancy, he says and prices are still prohibitive. But as Samsung SDI and LGE ramp production lines we should see an explosion in AMOLED in both units and $ volume in the next six to nine months. He is working on the principle that suppliers of organic materials to the two companies, which form the basis of a Korean technology lead, will now themselves make strong investments. His point is to keep an eye on the small displays first, and then watch out for TV sets perhaps a year later.