OLED TVs: Technology Advancements Thread - Page 105

Well, I will agree with Rogo here. There is no universal evidence that OLED will be that much better than LCD or PDP in any number of categories such as PQ, COM, COS, longevity, etc... Right now it is all assumptions.

Also the "I would like a TV as thin as a credit card" idea is sexy, but not practical as one would think.

Given the fact that in the past 6 years that virtually all CRTs have disappeared due to the fact that LCD/PDP have become cheap and available in a wide variety of sizes, all of the low hanging fruit is gone so to speak.

Customers will look at OLED as another "Flat" TV and compare it against LCD/PDP and make judgements, and they will not be flying off the shelves, IMO.

If OLED was ready 5 years ago, I think that you would be right, but now the competition is entrenched and that will take along time to overcome. You also assume that LCD/PDP will stand still during this time, and it wont. Just as PDP started to improve greatly to compete with LCD, both PDP and LCD will up the game.

Lots of reasons why OLED will be a success, but not necessarily a replacement that will crowd LCD/PDP out of the market.

Yes, thank you for catching my typo. A 155" diagonal would be about 11" 3" WIDE, not tall. It would be about 6' 4" tall. As you stated.

Outside of Fahrenheit 451, I don't think there are many homes that will accommodate that. Think of the WAF.

A real test? I think you missed the point... It was sarcasm about the PQ difference between the screens of an original PSP and PSV, not about comparing the latest and greatest smart phones. I wouldn't trade my 4 for a SII... but that's not for OLED vs. LCD reasons.

^^ I think it is not unexpected and inline with what most perceived, especially under glare. IMHO OLED is plausible because the difference is perceivable by J6P.

@rogo yes some Chinese city housing can be cramped but like I said, Chinese love bragging rights. I'm pretty sure they will squeeze a larger TV (if they can afford it) into a space that most others wouldn't Like in many things nowadays, I wouldn't be surprised if sale of huge size TV in China exceeds US in 3 years' time.

I don't think I missed the point.

Absolutely agree. LCD is kind of insidious technology which alwasy has a lot of room to go. E.g. LCD is not thin enough comparing to OLED? Solution: use Gorilla glass and it will get thin enough.

Remember couple of ys ago people claiming LCD will never get on plasma in the big size segment? Now the 65"/70"/80" LCDs are in shops and where are the plasmas?

Even in mobile/portable area OLED is still miniscule and it will have even tougher life with the introduction of high density LCDs like the 3K pixels in tablets.

Finally, LCD prices are always going south. Thus, even if OLEDs become viable they will be hard to justify on economy.

I kind of wonder what the real-world differences are going to be in best-panel thinness. Rumors were Apple had to go a bit thicker on "iPad3" due to needing an extra LED bar. But that's presumably a transient weakness. I tend to think that continuing to make LCD panels thinner is one of those areas of continuous improvement we'll see for several more years.

Yep. And we seem to have reports of a 90" Sharp LCD coming next year. Even if we get a big plasma, it will still certainly be smaller. In the meantime, Sharp will have sold a few hundred thousand 70" LCDs this year vs. at most a few thousand plasmas >65". Even I have been guilty of underestimating the progress of LCD, in part because I misjudged the power of the competitive forces.

What drove the 80" was all that fallow 40" capacity. And good for Sharp, right? Turning lead into gold. I certainly hope they follow on with the 90". I'd love to take my wife shopping and say, "This one!" just to see the look on her face.

Yea, although we'll see in 2012 if Samsung starts pushing their production out to other manufacturers to try to mainstream OLED at least in smartphones. There is chatter of a 500 million-unit smartphone market for 2012; I wonder what portion of that will be OLED.

And the continued production of 650+ million large-size LCDs (10+") per year for the foreseeable future will ensure those economics are in fact realized. Hundreds of thousands of OLEDs will barely push the learning curve for the next few years....

Sometimes I think you guys expect it to stand on its head and juggle 6 pins Rome is not built in a day. The first OLED device just came a year and half ago.

So what do u guys define as successful in shipment or % of market? 10m? 1%?

Successful and mass market are 2 different things. 5.1 is successful but not mass market. Similarly despite the contention, Bose is successful.

IMHO it is not exclusive. The 3 tech can coexist. No one needs to die in this western

Just some comments about Japan-

It's not all like Tokyo, downtown Tokyo least of all. People in the stereotypical tiny Tokyo apartment are in the minority of the entire Japanese population, and probably lack the money to buy a large screen TV in the first place. Go to an electronics store though, and the 60" and over TVs are the showcase items. I think your typical Japanese household can accommodate 60", and many would get one if not for the price, which is significantly higher than in the US to begin with.

AFAIK TV everywhere is more expensive than US. Even Taiwan and Korea. :P

I'm trying to figure out why and would appreciate if someone can explain this logic.

I think SMD will likely have capacity for nearly half of the smartphone market in 2012. The move to expand the customer base is happening with companies like Nokia and Motorola introducing models with OLED's in the 4th quarter and HTC rumored to bring back OLED's in the 1st half of 2012.

SMD is still going to need some non-handset markets to take off though. The price premium for OLED's means that it is unlikely that we'll see them in low-end smartphones and that is going to account for a large amount of the unit growth in 2012.

Slacker

HTC is Sammy's no 1 competitor in the Android market. I'm not sure if Sammy would sell in volume to them.

Nonetheless 4" "equivalent" capacity is one thing. Actual production is another. It'll be great to have 50m OLED handsets in 2012

If the OLED tablet market took off, I could see Samsung maybe tightening supplies to competitors but absent that, they will have a ton of excess capacity.

I know that equivalent capacity doesnt equal actual shipments, but 50 million units seems way way low. I cant imagine that they could be profitable at that kind of utilization number.

Slacker

Sometimes I think people confuse existence with success. Those are not the same.

If OLED TV has 1% of the market, that's an abject failure. If OLED TV gets to 10% of the market and stays there -- a scenario I find unlikely for a number of reasons -- it might or might not be successful. That'd be ~25m units per year, probably spread across 3-4 primary manufacturers. So, I dunno, but it's unlikely anyone would be making money at it. If they were, sure that's successful.

Luxury automobiles is certainly "successful" without being mass market for example. And BMW, Audi and M-B all make money in normal years.

Bose is quite successful. No arguing that point. 5.1? I'm less sure. It has almost no market penetration and almost no one makes money selling it. There are lot of companies making speakers so there is certainly economic activity around 5.1, but I think it's fair to call it (a) a mass-market failure (b) a very low profit business.

They probably will. But if you read the hype here, you could easily get the mistaken impression that the "cheaper, superior OLED is going to wipe all other technology off the planet and soon". I'm not apologizing for combating that perception.

And furthermore, recognizing that the OLED TV push could actually fail -- even though risk of failure does decrease with time and the number of players involved -- isn't based on some claim that it's exclusive.

I'm just tired of reading BS like "OLED will be cheaper, so and so says so". So I write analysis explaining why so and so isn't necessarily understanding things or choosing to be as honest them as I will. If no one wants to read that, they can skip the post.

By the way, here's an interesting forecast from just two months by DisplaySearch, which -- if anything -- tends to overhype new technologies. I will direct you to two things about it.

1) The TV market overall is barely growing.
2) It looks like one technology is more of less dominating the heck out of the others. And while that could change out in the future it cannot change in the near future. Those italicized words are not a prediction, they are essentially fact because you can't conjure production facilities like a Harry Potter magical effect.



From the same report as the graph:
OLED TV is set to debut around late 2012 as a contender in the 40”+ category, but will only grow to about 2.5% of the 40”+ segment by 2015 due to high prices and limited availability. Current projections are for OLED to debut at about 2-3X the price of a high-end LED-backlit LCD TV.

I would more or less call that the "optimistic" scenario. DisplaySearch is in the business of selling reports to people who believe in a better future. They could not, for example, have written: "We believe demand at 2-3x high-end backlit LCDs will be minimal and OLED will register nothing more than a 0.2% market share of the 40+" segment in 2015." That report would not sell. I'm not saying they don't believe what they wrote. I think their report is very plausible.

Wow. They're still selling CRTs! I wonder why. Lady at work got a 32" HDTV for a hundred and eighty some dollars on Black Friday.

Only a phone but wow it's a sweet screen. Bought the Galaxy Nexus today. Only a 4.65 inch screen but I'm doing my part to support OLED. Now bring on the 55 incher.

@slacker SMD is ALREADY profitable at current production and utilization, or at least that's what the opaque associate profits are saying.

I think 50m OLED handsets is a good number considering that's what people were hoping for iPad2 and it's 1/4 of capacity and smartphone 2011 market size.

Rest of the capacity can go to tablet, Sony and the 55" My guess is we should see an OLED monitor soon after 10" tablet.

@rogo does 10% OPM at SMD deemed successful or it has to hit Apple's range to be deemed successful?

Yes 3D exists but it's not successful. In fact it will probably exist in most new TV but hardly profit generating.

Anecdotally I doubt speakers are low profit business, from HTiB to soundbar to Bose. I don't think 5.1 is hardly profit generating though it's not mass market.

Funny that your DisplaySearch numbers are right inline with what my projections would be yet you're skeptical and I'm optimistic it will get better

1% would be deemed successful in my books, just as for huge size TV because that's a good START, a sizable beachhead. To get to 10% you need to reach 1% The difference between u and me is of course u think it'll go 1% and stay there. I think both OLED TV and huge TV will be substantially above 1% market by end of decade.

"The difference between u and me is of course u think it'll go 1% and stay there"

No I don't, nor have I said that.

I'm fairly sure if Samsung builds an 8G OLED TV fab and if all the others rumored to follow suit into OLED TV actually do so that OLED TV will exceed 10% by the end of the decade.

Not sure how you are now defining "huge TV", but if you mean 80" and up, then 1% is approximately correct. Could it be 2%? Sure. 3%? Dicier. 5%? No. 10%? Not even remotely possible.

If you mean 70" and up, I'm long ago on record as saying that could reach 10% eventually. I see no reason to back off that prediction even though I have proved it cannot reach that by the middle of the decade as there will simply be no production capacity from any combination of manufacturers that will make it possible. (Note: It is possible the production capacity could be commissioned in 2012 and online in time for mid decade. As there is no realistic chance of 70"+ demand exceeding 10% of the market from it's current position at 0.1% of the market, there is no reason for anyone to do this.)

Incidentally, if you are telling me Samsung is making 10% operating margin on their OLED production currently, I'd say that's good. I'd say it hardly proves "OLED is a success" on some macro scale, but it's good. I'd question whether Samsung can be trusted on those figures since they are pretty much the sole customer and the manufacturer (even if the divisions are reporting as separate entities, they could shift the profits wherever they wish). I'd also question whether they are breaking out OLED profitability from LCD as they are currently running an interesting scorched-earth policy on LCD which is yielding profit, albeit in tiny quantities across gigantic volumes.

I thought SED was completely dead because of that Texas IP firm and Canon. That was 5 years ago, wasn't it?

Ok so you're saying 10% OPM is good but not deemed successful. Neither is 10% market share in the coming future? So at what stage are they deemed successful in your books? Is plasma that was half of market and soon 10% considered successful then?

PS Let's keep the definition of huge to 70" as per the 70"+ thread. This definition has the notorious reputation of creeping up through the years

I'm saying 10% operating margin is good, but that doesn't mean the OLED business is a success. I can make 10% operating margin selling candy to the kids leaving school that walk by my house; doesn't make it a good business. It's successful when it's a good business.


If the OLED TV industry captures 10% I doubt any one player will consider their OLED TV business very good -- unless there is one player only. I'd consider the business overall a success, but I doubt any manufacturer will be very excited about it.

Yes, because there have been years of profits at much higher levels. Even if we listen to DisplaySearch and OLED enters the market at $4000 or so, it has to be around $2000 within the first 24 months to move pretty much any volume at all -- I've demonstrated this. There simply isn't a chance in Hades of 10% of the market paying $4000 for a 55" TV, sorry. Without the early-adopter profits, OLED will have to do better market-share than plasma did to truly be successful.

I also do not believe there is a future in a high-end, niche flat-panel technology business. There has never been such a thing in the past. In fact, strangely PDP has survived long past the "expiration date" of many so-called experts in part because it's been cheap and just high enough volume to capture massive scale economics relative to the production efficiencies that needed to be wrung out.

It is true that OLED will be able to ride the coattails of the production efficiencies generated by tiny OLEDs, but I do not believe that some fundamental law of production economics has been repealed that will allow OLED TVs to exist selling in small quantities. Nor do I accept that OLED will capture 100% of the high-end TV market simply by virtue of being OLED or being expensive.

Let's be crystal clear, if OLED TVs remain 2-3x the price of high-end LCDs, they cannot ever capture 10% of the TV market. High-end LCDs don't capture 10% of the market today. The portion of the market that will pay the highest prices will not change over time; the belief that it will is fundamentally at odds with the way the world works.

I would consider a permanent presence of 10% of the market successful; I'm just not sure how OLED can possibly achieve that kind of equilibrium to be honest. I suspect the final share will actually grow over time well beyond that (unless, of course, something causes mfrs. to pull back and the experiment into OLED more or less fails).

There are numerous factors summing up to explain this. Some of them:

1. Comparing prices at the exchange rate while internal markets are not working
at it. E.g. in Japan housing prices very high due to the lack of space.

2. These countries have high external trade surplus while the US has deficit. US deficit can be kept due to the role of dollar. In other words dollar is subsidized by the rest of the world.

3. Direct taxation of goods in many countries is much higher than in the US.

4. US market is huge, wealthy, very competitive and best integrated in the world. Compare this e.g. to Europe. They have big free market for goods and common currency but there are still local languages and local differences like in some countries satellite TVs are popular and in others not. This leads to problems like e.g. Sony TV high-end series US model HX929 has three different versions for Europe 920, 923, 925 and its menus have to support about 25 languages.

Right, US market is huge and wealthy + US is TV crazy.

Actually Japanese housing markets are only constrained in the larger cities, Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya. Outside of those markets, housing is quite reasonable, in many cases cheaper than allot of US market areas.


Granted, we used to export things and that is not the case anymore, but the Dollar is going to go away as the standard of world currency, our government is making sure of that.


Understatement of the year...


I would add that there is something that puzzles me about the TV market from Japan. Since 2007 the Dollar has fallen about 25% against the Yen. It has really caused my business to suffer since my parent corp is in Japan, yet TV manufacturers have continued to drop prices in this time frame. Any comments?

Yes, dead. Unless somebody tries to pull out the wooden stake. If they do, we'll shoot them with a silver bullet.

Why would our government favor that, since replacing the dollar as the world reserve currency would be such a disaster for us? Trilateral commission?

If that happens, we sure won't be buying many TVs, considering how much more expensive they will become.

I think his point is that we've been printing money for a decade now (monetary policy, not fiscal policy) and that's led to a long-term erosion in the value of the dollar.

For example, a dollar bought 1.17 euro a decade ago. It buys .76 euro now. 135 yen vs. 78 yen. The picture is similar against other secondary currencies.

Keep in mind that until the U.S. economy improves, the Fed has no real choice here, but it has spent many years of positive growth in "easy money" mode. This has eroded the dollar's value, never mind its effect on inflating the housing bubble, etc.

Guys, keep politics out of AVS. Complaint are coming in...

Thanks

Noted. I did try hard to use historical fact to answer the question rather than political opinion.

But, noted.

It must be remembered that the biggest players in the TV manufacturing game are huge conglomerates. The TV business is only a portion of the whole enchilada. The reason they are "willing" to stay in the losing game is because the TV business carries a bigger "share" of visibility. i.e., Samsung is one of the largest chip makers in the world, however, they are better known for their TV manufacture. That opens the door for their sale of washers/driers, air cond. etc, worldwide. Just a thought!