Samsung's 2012 OLED sets! - Page 6

They HAVE to say that, can't have LG stealing all the spotlight, now can they?

Why do you have such a desperate need to be worshiped on an internet site as a infallible soothsayer? Your stabs at what might happen down the road are not that important. They have no impact on what transpires, so why do you keep wanting to be lauded for them?. Get over yourself please.

I just find it amusing, Vinnie.


Just to be clear, Slacker. If this doesn't happen, the Samsung apologists are still going to state, Samsung never promised anything right? (Not that you are one of those, but every time some deadline slips, they explain to us how Samsung never said this or that. The article doesn't really change that calculus.)

Rich, I share your caution and hope. I also note that phrases like "mass production" have no meaning in this context. They "mass produce" Galaxy phones by the millions. No matter what, mass production of OLED TVs is measured in the 1000s of units initially -- or fewer.

What you don't get is manifold:

1) I know you despise me, not worship me.
2) I recognize that will never change
3) People do in fact value my forecasting
4) My forecasting is not an effort to impact what will happen, but to provide insight into what might happen
5) The "desperate need" is not mine, but rather those who effort to discredit me. When they are proved desperately off, I like to call them out on it. I recognize that will never change (1) or (2), nor do I care.

Do you happen to have a release date for those first couple thousand, or in what markets they will even appear? I'm pretty sure his prediction on when a TV would be coming has continually been adjusting like a floating point variable.
Edited by vinnie97 - 9/2/12 at 11:45am

Predictions are meaningless and just a way for some people to draw attention to themselves, when ever they have guessed right. Products do not get shipped because of someone's guesses. It is a futile exercise just to bolster some people's all consuming egos. It is like the rooster thinking that it is his crowing that causes the sun to rise every dawn.

What bothers you is how often I'm right, not predictions per se.

And the reason I make them has nothing to do with ego, but with informing people at AVS who are looking at making purchasing decisions. It helps them to know when things might actually be available.

Can you find this quote where I said there would be no OLED TVs before 2014. I'm not saying it doesn't exist (some version of it probably does), but I think it would be informative to see the context of it. It's probably dramatically different from what you are claiming it is.

The reason I ask for you (or someone) to find it is because I tried to search recently and found a lack of recent references -- between AVS' lousy search and struggling to coax Google to do what I wanted, I only got so far... There was definitely a time where I was very negative on things shipping -- most probably due to year after year of bogus promises from LG mostly -- but I'd like to see what the conversation was about.

OK, so I found some of the stuff I was looking for. Here's probably about the most "shockingly bad" prediction I've made (from November 2010):

http://www.avsforum.com/t/681125/oled-tvs-technology-advancements-thread/1770#post_19462056
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So I was certainly right that the TV wouldn't ship in early 2012. What will prove to be wrong -- if anyone ships -- is that the price might be $10,000 or even somewhat less. Of course, no one has shipped yet and the post in question specifically refers to Samsung, which is somewhat less likely to ship. Part of the discussion I linked refers to some pilot line Samsung was allegedly building that would be able to produce 4,000 TVs per month by "the end of next year". I knew it wouldn't happen and of course it didn't. Anyway, this prediction -- already half right -- might prove significantly wrong in the coming months. Worth watching.

If one continues to read the same thread, one can see where my skepticism came from.

Not everything depends on glass size. There is no real precedent in the history of flat panel displays for a technology that has yet to scale to 15 inches in a mass-produceable form to suddenly appear at 55 inches.

Due to things like yield, even if the glass allows for 55-inch OLEDs (which it might, but I'm more than a little skeptical), the factory will instead turn out smaller displays so that they don't end up with single-digit yields.

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So the "miss" there is that I'm correct this has never happened before. Nothing that has been in production at 15" has mysteriously and magically scaled to 55". Why? Because it's hard. If you look at TFT LCD it scaled very very slowly in size. Plasma was first commercialized for TV at 42" (it actually didn't work well much smaller, although 32" plasmas were once available thanks to the Fujitsu-Hitachi Plasma joint venture), but took a long time to scale to 60".

Of course, the miss was narrow. I mean, the conversation was in 2010 about things happening in 2011. They didn't. And it's low late in 2012 and still nothing has happened. Now, again, there are 3 months left in the year to ship something. If it ships in the developed world such that real people can buy it, I'll have been proved wrong. That goes without saying. Until then, things have unfolded as I expected.

One thing that wasn't anticipated by me -- or really anyone else here and not much elsewhere -- was that LG would commercialize RGBW and target 8G production. Whether that was to catch up to what they feared from Samsung or was actually what motivated Samsung in the first place I can't say. But clearly that tech is a game changer. It doesn't rely on development science fiction -- like printable OLEDs that we've been reading about since at least 2000 but still don't exist -- but instead allows for OLED TVs without the development of any new manufacturing techniques at all. That's what's so exciting about it.

On the pages leading up to that, there is much chatter about a 31" $9000 LG that is promised for 2011 (never existed of course) and my general skepticism of OLED reaching volume production and cost targets. I also seem to stake out a pretty clear devil's advocate position in that it's clear I'm aware of OLED success in smartphones, but suggest it will be some time before they become ubiquitous. (And that's been proved true. And I believe they will eventually dominate smartphones, as Slacker was saying back then. Please note, if you look only at high-end smartphones, you get a very bad sense of market share for OLEDs in smartphones. You think they are much more prevalent than they are. That said, the prevalence is growing.)

Anyway, here's some more fodder for you:
So what's great about this is this is from October 2010. Two years have elapsed. If I said now, "mainstream OLED is about 2 years away... you should be able to buy them in 2013, but only in 2014 will the prices come down the first notch and make them even slightly reasonable to consider", it would be a set of statements that only a fool would rebut. So the part from 2010 where I say, "We could make a case that OLED is now only 4 years away" looks pretty darned good. Then I added the stuff about the 50-inch being out in 2013 and "astronomically expensive". So let's correct the errors in that prediction. (1) It will be 55 inches (2) It might slip in weeks before 2013. This is hardly feeling wrong.

What actually feels most shaky to me is the notion of truly great LCDs that are affordable. The Sony HX850 is very good and it's $2400 for a 55". I mean that's a good deal vs. several years ago, but it's still edge lit and it's still $2400. That's a soft target for OLED to the extent that the early adopters will buy the "best" for sme premium. Of course, we are talking <2x so we mean a sub $5000 OLED. That's 40% below the anticipated intro price of $8000. And that assumes the 55" high end LCD is a fixed target. Presumably, by 2014, that tier of TV is (a) better (b) probably around $2000. And, of course, a decent 55" LCD is around $1000.

When I first read that stuff back I was like, "Wow, Rogo, you were off base" but it doesn't actually look that way. It looks like I was both staking out the skeptical pole amidst all the hype and yet pretty close to spot on with timing.

The stuff that is going to be most "wrong" if things ship this year is wrong mostly by weeks or months. The fact they went straight to 55" is something. It will also be interesting to see how few units really ship in 2013. I mean the presence of product in the marketplace is very, very important. But if unit shipments don't reach into the six figures, the impact of all this -- both on the market and more importantly on the learning curve -- will be very small.
Edited by rogo - 9/2/12 at 5:10pm

Well he got David B to take the bait, to provoke the argument that he went looking for to hijack the thread, when he dredged up a bunch of his old comments, for no other reason but to resurrect old arguments and hijack the thread to make it all about him instead of the product that the thread is labelled for.Congratulations.
Edited by greenland - 9/2/12 at 5:37pm

There is no "baiting". There is no thread hijacking.

We are talking about Samsung OLEDs. At the moment, there is no product, no announced ship date, no announced shipping price. There is no way these posts are interfering with a discussion of any actual news regarding these displays. There just isn't.

If there was actual news, we'd be talking about it.

Thread "hijacking" is when you take an active discussion and derail it. There is nothing much going on here that's active. The IFA news was reported on and reacted to. Now what? Not much until there's product or another show or an actual press release from Samsung saying:

* When
* Where
* How much


I should add that as I mentioned back in January, I love Multi View. I think it's one of those features most people will use never, but some parents will use with their kids and some spouses will use together. It's a great example of where the lightning-fast refresh of OLED enables something that would've be unrealistic on LCD.