OLED TVs: Technology Advancements Thread - Page 176

Probably 2x a premium LCD or so... So like $6000 for a 55". Eventually, they'll be as cheap. But it's not only a yield problem today, it's a "this is more expensive to do" problem. I do believe LG could reach cost parity in 3-4 years realistically, assuming they really ramp the IGZO-backplane making.

I'm willing to write it off to being a prototype.

Sounds reasonable.

What's bothing me a little is that a month or so ago if you went to lg.com, the big five section scrolling banner had OLED in position 1. So anyone looking for a TV, washingmachine, cellphone, or anything would see it. But now I see google TV, 3D Tv, and LED TVs promoted but not OLED. I wonder why?

OLED isn't happening soon.

LCD quality is going backwards and plasma is barely hanging on.

I'm afraid.

Preorders hit 100, LG OLED is set to go on sale on Monday.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/14/us-lg-tv-idUSBRE91D03Z20130214

Unit sales are meaningless, we need to get some reviews.

Funny thing here is the obvious omission of a US release date. Big shocker.

ZT60 (and maybe the F8500) is gonna' keep Plasma from flatlining this year...but next year could be grim.

Wow, all of 100? Very impressive.

that right. The AMOLEDs will compete with active-matrix TFTs in this premium end of the cell-phone market. thanks

I'm wondering how many hardware revs (for the same 2013 model) we're going to see as the year progresses. IMO (guessing, because I don't understand yet the start to end development cycle), it's almost certainly going to be a learn-as-you-go model in small time slices, perhaps even month by month. Given the nature of small output numbers, they'll be able to upgrade fairly quickly I think.

Isn't there a AVS-ish forum in South-Korea? Or maybe in North-Korea

North Korea has one. They've been debating the release of this thing for months:

But there's only been the prototype, and no one knows for sure what the yields will be.

They are supposed to arrive in the US sometime in March.

http://ces.cnet.com/8301-34435_1-57562434/lgs-oled-tv-to-arrive-in-march-for-about-$12k/

I saw "The Hobbit" in 48fps, and it made a real difference in action scenes. Where, for example, I noticed blurring in "The Avengers," I found "The Hobbit" to be perfectly clear. It made following the action much more pleasant.

I saw both movies at NYC location, 3D IMAX, with state-of-the art projection and sound capabilities. Both directors are known for quality work. Therefore, I think the difference in clarity was entirely due to the 48fps technology. Admittedly, the film looks different--almost video-like. I'm reminded of British TV shows from the 1970s and earlier, where the interior scenes were captured on video but the exterior scenes were captured on film. You could always see the transition. Here's another thought: early silent movies weren't films at 24fps; they generally ran between 16fps and 20fps. Making the transition from those movies to the modern 24fps gave a different look to the screen action.

I think the advance in frame rate is something we'll get used to. The next generation will take it for granted. Eventually, home TVs will have to support 240 refresh rate in order to display 48fps. The next generation of Blu-Ray discs will have to support a higher transfer rate. Cable TV and streaming services, of course, will just use more compression so our picture quality will get worse.

Perhaps real life is "video like". Perhaps all day we witness the Soap Opera Effect.

Most of movie making relies on the fact it's shot at 24fps. If you ever see a movie set, it looks not at all real or life-like. The problem with 48fps is that it exposes the fiction. In "The Hobbit" this, more than anything, caused the people who didn't like it to not like it. It looked fake to them because, well, it's fake.

Over time, this ought to be something that can be mitigated. But the question is whether the industry will bother. Maybe for some portion of films where motion is essential, it will become commonplace. Generally speaking, 24fps works not only for most films, but for most content within most films.

Anyway, back to OLED....

Selling 100 means nothing, of course, except that a really big LCD is 3x more popular than a pretty small OLED. And that means nothing, too.

But after a year to hype this, basically even in "hometown Korea". the product is generating absolutely no interest at $10,000.

While I'm interested in reviews, Slacker, I don't think they mean anything either. This is first-gen stuff and I'm not sure why reviews are more telling that sales data.

I guess what I'm interested in is (a) global rollout schedule (b) production plans (c) when's the price cut?

That tells me much more about the future.

The fact that 100 really rich Koreans will soon take delivery of a TV I'd personally consider too small for my house -- and I wouldn't care if it is the best reviewed TV ever, it's still too small for me -- is a milestone after a decade-long wait, but it doesn't yet feel like a very important one.

The OLED TV sales will end up being too small a sample for consumers to get statistically significant performance feedback from owners, this year. One market research firm has recently projected that only 1,600 units will be sold worldwide for all of 2013.

I've seen the statements, I appreciate the link, I've just not heard anything since CES about the US roll out

I would go with b as the most important on my radar. The global rollout is nice, but selling 1,000 a month isnt going to tell us much more about their yields.

The reason I care about the reviews is I want to know the performance "floor" of the product. I fully expect issues with a first-generation product but the failure modes matter, particularly if they are related to WRGB or the lifetime of the materials.

Hell, I think the 100 units probably overstates demand. How many of those units are heading to R&D labs in Taiwan, Japan or in Samsung?

Good LED. Industry & Energy's (MOCIE) Next-Generation Growth Engine Industries Initiative. thank you

So we've discussed yield issues over and over in this thread... but what exactly does "yield" mean in the context of these OLED TV's? If I was judging LCD TV's, I would put their real-world "yield" at less than 10%. What I mean by that is that 90% of the LCD's I see in the stores have some dead pixels, backlight bleed, clouding, bad color uniformity, etc. But yet somehow these qualify for sale at retail. Maybe the reason OLED TV yields are considered low is because they are being held to a higher standard than your average LCD? That would make sense to me if they expect someone to pay $12K for a TV - it needs to be perfect!

That wouldn't shock me.

True, true on the demand. And fair points on the idea of a performance "floor". It's going to be hard to get lifetime type data for a long while -- or at least I hope it's going to be hard.

No, you don't really understand yield. It has nothing at all to do with what you consider defects, sorry.

A couple of dead pixels, some backlight "bleed", some uniformity flaws are not yield issues. Every panel you see at market has passed QC and therefore counts as positive yield. When panels come off the line they are tested -- albeit briefly and poorly -- and they have to perform to a certain minimum standard to get turned into TVs and boxed up.

For modern LCD TVs, the typical fab that makes 50,000 panels on a line probably has a yield north of 90%. Well, actually it definitely has a yield that high.

The dismal OLED yield is not about getting it perfect, it's about getting it working at all. I wish it were what you were hoping, but no. When we hear that LG was yielding 10%, that means they literally had to recycle 90% of the panels because they simply didn't produce a picture not that 2-3 pixels were bad.

LG has two very new processes going on and each was probably failing badly.

1) They are making 55" IGZO backplanes. No one else is near that yet, including LG in any other product. IGZO backplanes will eventually have about a 99% yield on their own. But it's bleeding-edge stuff right now and apparently the yields there were (are?) below 10%.

2) They are vapor depositing three layers of OLED material atop one another, one after the other, that need to be perfectly uniform. While the process isn't especially technically tricky, it's new, especially given the materials being used. And it has to be precise, the material layers need to be really even, and the current from the transistors needs to excite the three layers of material in a pixel-shaped region accurately when asked to. This process step is likely again going to have very high yields eventually, but surely did not initially.

rogo: will OLED perform as well as plasma at 100,000 hours? By that I mean will picture quality on OLED decay at the same percentage as plasma at 100,000 hours?

Since OLED might be expensive people may shy away from buying it if its picture quality degrades too swiftly and if you HAVE to buy one three years later.

Will the color blue in OLED hold up well at 1000,000 hours?

Anyone else who knows about OLED picture quality performance hours at say 100,000 hours of use feel free to chime in.

I know that a display doesn't have to last 100,000 hours but the new plasmas say they can last that long.

How long can OLED picture quality hold up?

Does anyone really care if their OLED set lasts 100,000 hours to half brightness? That's almost eleven-and-a-half years from 24/7 use. Realistically you are not going to have more than 8 hours a day (that would be heavy home use) which is 34 years. And I would say that most people probably only watch about 4 hours of television a day, rather than 8 which is approaching 70 years.

Even if you assume eight hours a day rather than four, 30,000 hours would get you 10 years until half brightness from OLED. I think that is achievable.

For me the issue is the even aging because i want the color temperature to remain stable, brightness retained, and the panel is resistant to uneven wear.
Plasma (which I prefer) has IR and burn in issues.
There is no way you should use one as a computer monitor.
I have a pioneer 600M in my office that I watch primarily news. The logo and banner areas are burned in.
You will notice that folks who say burn in is not a problem do not say you cannot get burn in.
LCD's are far better suited to fixed image display or that primarily display a source that uses logos and tickers.

Since OLEDs are emissive and subject to wear, I will be paying attention to this aspect of their performance.

- Rich
Edited by RichB - 2/15/13 at 6:19am

Those are definitely valid concerns to have about OLED, but are not necessarily related to how many hours it will take to reach half brightness. I'm pretty sure that Panasonic's 100,000 hours rating is higher than any LED set available, yet they are still susceptible to those issues whereas LED is not. And an LED set at half brightness is probably similar to a Plasma at full brightness.

I am surprised that you have a Kuro relegated to an office for watching the news, when any cheap LED set would do a better job without permanent damage.

That is true but the hours to half brightness can be an indicator.

I bought it when they were to be had at great deals.
I have a 65GT30 in my living room.
Even with the burn in, the picture and angle viewing make it worth it.

I have seen Samsung OLED phones at the Verizon Store with massive icon burn-in.

My guess is the best we can hope for is burn-in resistance.

- Rich

LGs White OLED architecture boasts a lifetime in excess of 100.000 hours. There are 8,766 hours in a year, so these devices are very stable. Another advantage of the White OLED approach is the elimination color shift over time due to one color dying out more quickly than the others.

IEEE Spectrum
O’Donovan [principal research analyst for Gartner’s semiconductor research group] says he thinks, at least in the short term, that LG’s white OLED approach “will be better for yields and will create a more uniform color for the whole panel.” He argues that although researchers have extended the lifetime of blue OLEDs to about 20 000 hours, white OLEDs eliminate the problem of fading blues altogether.


From the same article, for future printed oleds using solution materials:
Over the years, companies have lowered the defect rate and have increased screen life by extending the time it takes for the blue pixels to fade to half their original brightness. That metric has risen from 5000 hours a few years ago to about 34 000 hours today at typical TV brightness levels, according to an announcement by DuPont. Though that’s still a lot less than the 50 000 to 80 000 hours of an LCD, it’s enough to allow an OLED TV to run about 18 hours a day for at least seven years.

my 600M was burglarized from my house in 2010 and it still ticks me off every time i think about it. i find your use of the one you still own morbidly disgusting.

OK, then I wont tell you about the 500M in my kids playroom

That one is in perfect shape.
Hopefully, this year the Panasonic ZT series will come close to it in black levels.
I expect it to exceed it in full screen brightness and color accuracy.

- Rich

I doubt it, but....

... so do I

As will I. Uneven wear can absolutely occur long before half brightness. Especially if the "wear curve" is parabolic.

Repeat after me. LG does not use white OLEDs. LG does not use white OLEDs.

If they did, the advantage would exist, but they don't.

Am I sure, yes, I am 100% sure. Not 99% sure, 100% sure.

They use red, green and blue OLEDs in a stack. They use all three colors with exactly the same duty cycle. That is to say, for each sub-pixel you see, there is an underlying RGB stack that is used for the same duration and to the same brightness. But contrary to the way you might be reading or interpreting the linked material, if the three colors wear unevenly, then the color will in fact shift over time. For example, if the blue dies out quicker, the display will shift away from neutral color to a really ugly yellow tint. Furthermore, if OLED life isn't very good overall, burn-in risk would be real. (I'm not saying it's real, I'm saying the pseudo-white approach doesn't offer a damn thing over a "regular" RGB approach in that regard.)
O'Donovan sure says what you quoted but he is wrong. LG does not use white OLEDs.
That's barely enough to make me feel entirely comfortable. I don't want my TV "half as bright as new", nor do you. If the decline is linear, I'd basically consider the first 10,000 or so hours really good on a TV like and the next 5-10K pretty decent. That said, I doubt my TV is on for 2,000 hours per year and I am comfortable with 5-7 years of everyday use.