Larger OLED Displays Will Be Increasingly Printed, OLEDs World Summit Told
SAN FRANCISCO -- Over time, manufacturers of larger organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays for TV sets will use printing methods to make them, David Fyfe, a consultant with Sumitomo Chemical, said during OLEDs World Summit Friday. The shift to printing over “fine metal mask” (FMM) manufacturing will be driven by the cost reductions offered by printing methods, he said. “Samsung is predicting that 26 percent of TVs will be OLEDs by 2020, and to get there the cost is going to have to come down to be pretty close to where LCD [liquid crystal display] is,” Fyfe said. “I don’t think that can be achieved with fine metal mask technology."
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For now, FMM continues to be the main manufacturing method, Fyfe said, because it still offers the ability to achieve higher resolution displays. But even new higher-definition TV products and services will require fewer than 200 pixels per square inch in a display, he said. That makes them “definitely printable,” he said.
Fyfe predicted the industry will move away from using white-OLEDs with color filters for displays. “It is recognized to be an interim solution and it’s not particularly power efficient,” he said. “That’s going to be important as [the amount of] legislation to control the power being drawn by TVs increases."
The quality of large-screen OLED displays still needs to improve, said Jennifer Colegrove, vice president of emerging display technologies for DisplaySearch. As of June, she could still detect dead pixels in Samsung’s large OLED display and a lack of uniformity in LG’s, she said. Those two companies are expected to largely dominate the market for OLED TVs for now, she said. “Of course, in the future, we expect more and more companies to join the market,” including Panasonic and Sony, she said.
In the smartphone and tablet markets, flexible OLED displays could become more prevalent, said Vinita Jakhanwal, director of small and medium displays for IHS iSuppli. Flexible displays can be made thinner and lighter than existing smartphone displays, she said. For instance, an iPhone 5 display is about 2.4 mm, and a flexible Active Matrix OLED display can be just 1 mm thick, she said.