OLED TVs: Technology Advancements Thread - Page 177

good info, but isn't it academic (speculations) only?
So far I don't see any OLED TV in any store.
Was that data based on small OLED panels that are in phones or cameras, but in 55" TV?

My conspiracy theory is that there are no large OLED TV in stores due to manufacturer can't guarantee OLED panel will work to the specs over warranty period and it will be too much risk to sale those to latter provide "free" replacement under 1 year or so. Also plus manufacture yields.
I hope I'm wrong and we'll see OLED TV in stores tomorrow ;-)

If blue decays too fast then that is a problem.

As for TV use there are people in this world that keep their TVs running most all of the time--being unconcerned about power consumption though ironically they're the same type people who don't want to buy a new display at quick intervals--you know--the Joe6pack variety. If OLED decays too fast they won't buy them which of course doesn't matter the first few years as the AVSers will of course buy them but some portion of the dumbo public will eventually have to buy them if prices are to fall on them.

I hope OLEDs do last a long time and I hope they can solve the color blue problem they have--no one wants a TV with fading blues where you have to continually adjust for that deficiency.

i may be paranoid about the performance issue--the reason I am is I have heard the same old arguments about people using TVs for 4 hours a day when the DLP lamp replacement issue was afire. No one wanted to replace lamps at quick intervals--I suspect that the dumbo population doesn't want to buy TVs at quick intervals.

OLED may not have to last 100,000 hours but blue performance needs to last longer than 20,000 hours.

This may sound alarmist but remember how berserk this forum went about Panasonic plasma blacks getting lighter and lighter as those sets aged?

If they did that about blacks--don't think that they won't do the same when it comes to fading blues.

The real critical point for OLED might be two years after they have been used--they don't need to have declining blue color levels at 2 years--you'll hear about it here first--and then all the people that lose their minds about "Rainbows" and "Flicker" and "Burn-in" will be on the rampage and OLED will not need that at that time when they will still be comparably high priced.

I think the manufacturers need to be more concerned about getting OLED right instead of getting it out quickl!

Course if 4K Chinese LCD comes out roaring they may have no choice but to come with it and then each year try to correct problems?
Edited by Artwood - 2/16/13 at 11:40am

cough......plasma.......cough.

while your 500m is on borrowed time, thats still practical use for the set. now im curious as to whats actually in your personal viewing setup. may i refer to you as "moneybags rich"?

There you go again. "White oled" is just an old industry term to describe an architecture that produces white from the R, G, and B components. The WOLED acronym is a shorthand way of saying white OLED. He isn't saying they have a single oled material that produces white on its own, if that's what you are thinking.

As for the color shift you are right in what you are saying, so far as it goes. The other piece was described in a different thread on this board which went through this whole argument. The key quote is this:

"Because of the energy transfer from blue to yellow emitters, both emitters decrease at the same rate and the ratio of blue to yellow remains the same. This provides a stable color as a function of aging time. This is one of the important considerations for a full-color display and minimizes the effects on color balance and gray scale for the RGB and RGBW formats."

In RGBW/WRGB/WOLED/white oeld (whatever you want to call it) architecture, the electrons pass through all 3 colors and they interact with each other. The energy from one layer passes through the remaining layers and excites the electrons in that layer. For this reason, the RG phosphorescent layer is really a single yellow layer consisting of almost entirely green but with just a few drops of red. The interaction of the green on the red materials produces the desired color. In a similar fashion, these electrons then pass through the blue layer and excites the blue material. The combination reduces the differential aging issue to where its not considered to be a problem during a tv lifetime. Its not magic, its materials science. The trade-off, of course, is you need color filters.

How much do color filters reduce brightness?

I don't "go anywhere". I'm actually telling you how LG's technology works. It isn't "WOLED". I'm not sure why you think there are "old industry terms". But there are certainly "white LEDs" in the inorganic side, which are single devices that have been engineered to emit white light. The LG technology isn't a "white OLED" at all. It's not engineered to produce white light from a single device. It's a stack of red, green, and blue layers that are "excited" together to produce white light. This isn't some "distinction without a difference" between the three layers are discrete.
So, again, maybe this is all true. We really can't know. But all this material does is confirm exactly what I said here: The blue is, in fact, separate and if it has different aging characteristics, that will eventually matter. It's not OLED bashing, it's math.

Thank you for sharing the "white LED" info. You know much more about LEDs than I. Terminology can be confusing when applied to similar fields. LG is definitely not using a white LED technology. It's agreed they are using "layers that are "excited" together to produce white light". So I guess its just a question of definitions of white oled and WOLED. Yes, different aging will eventually matter but just saying the folks in the industry don't seem to think it will in a tv lifetime using this architecture. And I do know that you are not OLED bashing. Since this is an oled technology thread there is an overview page on oled-info.com about the status of oled tvs.

So this is a good question. LG discussed this at the SID conference last May.

"They say that WRGB is more efficient than direct-emission (or Side-By-Side, SBS as they call it). This is somewhat surprising because an WRGB design includes color filters which block about 66% of the light (except for the white sub-pixel which isn't filtered). But for white this design is very effective, and they say that in smart TVs a lot of the content will be white (web browsing, etc.) - which explains their claim that WRGB is more efficient. They also say that they hope to reduce the power consumption by around 50% by 2015."

I wonder if part of LG's power-consumption claim comes from the fact they are already on IGZO and Samsung isn't.... Some of the rest of it is using the unfiltered white, although our prior discussions of that are appropriate skeptical as to how many combinations of colors will allow for that.

Regardless, I don't dispute their claims on power and would be pleased to see it reduced a further 50%.

Final Specs, User manual, etc. posted on Korean website:

http://www.lge.co.kr/lgekr/product/detail/LgekrProductDetailCmd.laf?prdid=EPRD.254552

User Manual:

http://www.lgservice.co.kr/cs_lg/search_service/search.jsp?category=TOTAL&ch1=&ch2=&ch3=&ContentsClose=&kwd_konan=55EM9700

Are you sure it's 66% light loss?

I was thinking that the WRGB might have less light scatter, so it's better conserving the light.

They're just making a quick calculation. An RGB stack that is later filtered to release only red is throwing away the green and blue, or 2 out of the 3 primary additive components.

Whew! This light scattering issue is more complex than I thought!

Oleds apparently use a light scattering layer to increase light, but from other reading I've done, this increase may be less directional.

Complicated!

I need breakfast.

LG Display announced today that it has decided to invest 706 billion korean won in a 8th generation OLED-Television manufacturing plant.
The line can handle 2,200mmx2,500 mm panels and will be installed in its P9 plant in Paju South Korea.

The company plans to begin investment in the line, which will focus on WRGB OLED evaporation process, in the first quarter of 2013, with mass production scheduled for the first half of 2014 at a monthly capacity of 26,000 input sheets.

Just saw that also
http://news.yahoo.com/lg-display-invest-655-million-oled-panels-222903201--finance.html

Looks like when 2015 comes and I replace my 2005 Sony 42" 720p HDTV the prices of a 55" OLED may be reasonable, this is my family room HDTV.

I'll stick with projection for the basement HT.

So, some back of the envelope on that indicates it's a pretty tepid investment. It's a lot better than them not investing, but it's not a huge bet and I think it indicates (a) minimal price reductions in the very short run (b) substantial price reductions later in 2014 and into 2015.

An 8G substrate can make 6 panels per sheet at 100% yield. There is no way yields will be anywhere near 100% when the plan goes online at a date we'll call June of next year (announcements like "first half" mean, "not first quarter" and so it's between April and June, but usually it's safe to assume June).

So the monthly capacity is 26,000 x 6 or 156,000 displays x (yield percentage). Let's say over the course of the first year, the yield averages out to 65%. I believe that's fairly generous, but if it's true, you get very close to ~100K displays per month, or about 1.2M per year. That's a very tiny 0.5% of the total TV market, but represents something around 5% of the total market for displays 50" and up. Now, obviously, they can't steal any share from people who want truly larger displays, but I believe they can take share from the 50-60" category for anyone willing to "buy the best". Keep in mind, the overwhelming majority of displays 50" and up that sell are 50" and 55" and the next largest category, by far, is 60" (please include things like any remnant 52" displays in the group, I'm rounding).

When you view the production through this lens, we can conclude that LG is seeking to capture about 5% of the category it's in within 2 years from now and so when we look at pricing, we should ask, "What will it take to do that?" It's also worth noting that there is nothing requiring LG to push 26,000 substrates through this production facility each month and, in the opening months at least, they likely won't. I suspect that pricing around 2x the current premium category will be necessary to move any reasonable quantity of displays but even that will have to come down to push this facility to capacity. That said, I don't see LG going there immediately once this facility is online.

It seems like a sub $5,000 price is not in the offing next year but is necessary come 2015 to achieve a push toward capacity of this facility.

It's also worth noting that if Samsung makes a similar investment (and figures out how to make displays at all, which it currently really can't do), that would drive prices down somewhat faster.

Entry into the market by a Sony or Panasonic begins to make 2016 look like the first year we might actually see reasonable pricing in the 55" OLED category (read as sub $4000). It's hard to see how LG's plans and 2013 pricing get us that much faster. They literally can't just wake up and decide to push production over to OLED faster given that it would take a much-larger expansion than they are doing this time going forward and the soonest that could come online would be 2015. An "all-in" bet on OLED -- which I believe is unlikely anyway since the $3,000 TV market is actually quite small even at 55" -- couldn't arrive before then.

This is a positive step to be sure, but if anything it points to a slower time schedule than we might have forecast a year ago.

The capacity of the upgrade is definitely on the low-end of what I had hoped.

OTOH, the timeframe is faster than I had expected. I had thought that the initial schedule would aim for a ramp in the 2nd half of 2014.

I wouldnt expect a $5000 price point at the beginning of next year, but it seems at least possible for Christmas 2014....certainly by 2015. LG can't expect that Samsung will stand still for very long.

I kind of feel the timeframe they said is more or less the "2nd half of 2014"... "Mass production to begin in the first half of 2014"....
Yes, precision on timing is tricky here. It seems very unlikely to me that it happens by next Christmas. That would be 2 price drops of 30% (or more using U.S. pricing) from here.

As for Samsung, their ability to produce will have a lot to do with their standing still. I still don't believe they can go to anything near 100K units per month using their SMS method. I doubt they disagree with that assessment.

My thinking is simply based on the number of units per month that will likely (hopefully?) be producing by next Christmas. The original 8K fab that current OLED televisions are being produced on should still be in production. If yields across the two fabs are at 50%, LG would still be producing 100K a month.

You have a better feel for the high-end market than me. Is there any chance that they could sell close to 100K units a month next Christmas if the price of a 55" television is $7000?

Good analysis above.

I'll add that DisplaySearch expects the OLED consumer TV market to be $3 billion by 2015. If the sets sell for $4000 by then, that would be a total of about 750,000 units sold in 2015 or even less if the price stays higher. It seems to me if the yields are OK, LG will end up with plenty of capacity for their share of that market with this commitment, right?

So, yea, Slacker, if they run both lines, they could produce that many displays.

As to whether they could sell that many at that price, it seems very crudely to be on the cusp of plausible, but not especially likely. The premium end of the market today in that size category is priced at ~$3000 (+/- depending on retailer, sales, etc.) in the U.S. for example. It's likely that sliver represents no more than about 10% of the total of "50"+ category". Annualized, you are talking about something under 3 million total units globally and so you'd need to get 40% share in that sub-category with something more than twice as expensive. On that math, there isn't a chance. The reason I place it on the "cusp of plausible" is that some of the inputs in the formula are (a) estimates from industry data (b) subject to change a bit. It still feels like at best, you'd get 5% share within the sub-category if the price were as high as $7000. And very roughly that's 10,000 units per month.

So, yeah, Rich. I figure yields will inevitably improve. They might even improve somewhat quickly, especially if LG ends up also making IGZO displays for Apple as seems likely*. (A lot of the yield problem seems to be on the backplane side and the conventional wisdom is that there are no real showstoppers there, even if there are substantial growing pains.)

It does seem believable that LG will be able to satisfy anywhere from 50% of a smaller market than the one you described (higher prices, fewer units, really low LG yields) to perhaps 100% of the market you described ($4000 price, 60K units per month, not-even-60% yields across the two production facilities). So I'm less worried about that part of the equation coming to fruition. What's more "concerning" is that all in these numbers aren't very interesting looking out 2 years. Of course, we've known this for a while thanks to both DisplaySearch and, well, the fact that I made a similar set of forecasts last year without their help using standard forecasting techniques (like once you have a good baseline, production rarely does much more than double in the ensuing year).

What's somewhat fascinating, I think, is how low the price will have to get to move, say, 1 million units. If we look back up to what I was describing to Slacker, the "premium market within the large-size market" where OLED operates is something below 3 million TVs right now. Even if we buy the idea that this is growing somewhat and that the estimate could be somewhat low (for example, it could currently be 2x that if all the inputs are ridiculously far off), it's instructive to realize how small premium markets are in general. To sell 1 million OLEDs, they probably have to be priced very close to where the F8000 Samsungs (or equivalent) will exist in 2013. At that price, you might be able to sell even more OLEDs, but you'd have to wait until you could produce more (e.g. in the coming year). But to sell 5 million OLEDs, you'd literally have to get pricing down below where the top-end LCDs sit right now and somehow also gain nearly 100% share in that category. The latter of those seems like something that would happen overnight, but it doesn't actually work that way in the real world. Not every buyer will just suddenly buy an OLED in the first year some kind of parity is reached, especially given the likelihood the LCD option is even better by then.

I think something like 5 million sold is probably a 2018 goal and likely represents the first year that OLED is priced in such a way that it targets more than just the premium sliver of the market, albeit not much more.

* Those would be small IGZO displays for iPads and such, but the expertise in ramping IGZO making would likely help LG on their TV-sized display-making as well.

^ Rogo: Are you assuming 2k or 4k OLEDs from LG? Seems to me that if OLED is primarily 2k and higher end LCD is 4k the marketing of the 4k LCD at cheaper prices for a given size could make OLED a tough sell in the showroom to the average uneducated buyer.

Given all of the great discussion in this thread today, I am convinced more than ever that there is no way I'll be getting an 80-84" OLED for $7,000-9,999 in 2015. So, 4K 80-84" LCD it will be for my next TV. Does anyone have any idea/guess how much the Sony 4K X900A TVs are going to go for? Here's my simple logic. Usually the biggest size in a TV range commands 2x the price. So if the 84" Sony 4K is $25,000...then I'm guessing the 65" X900A will be $12,000 (roughly). The 55" will be just under 2/3rds the price of the 65" (similar to the 2012 HX950 series 55" vs 65"). So that equates to $7,499. So, in summary (using the Sony X900A projected MSRPs as an example):
84X900A - $24,999
65X900A - $11,999
55X900A - $7,499

Now fast forward two model years to 2015. How much would an 84" 4K LCD TV be going for then? Maybe $9,999? Does OLED have a chance in hell of hitting that price point for an 84" 4K version? Considering it's only two model years away...I say no way. I'm guessing it will be 2018 or 2019 before it sniffs that price point.

Thoughts and opinions?

If LG does not switch to 4K by that point, I believe there is absolutely no chance they will capture 10-30% of the high-end market. They will lose the marketing war, period, to the 4K marketing onslaught. This is especially true because 4K streaming will be real by then, whether or not 4k discs are. A high-end display will sell to the people that want high-end content.

That said, I have no doubt LG can transition to 4K on their technology.

I'd say "no way" is correct. Beyond that, I don't see how they make many TVs bigger than the 55" anyway. An 8G substrate cuts beautifully into 6 55" displays at 2200 x 2500mm... But for 60" displays, it's too small to do that, so you wind up with only 4 displays. It's even worse with 65" cuts, where you can't get more than 3 because the width is 2/3 of the substrate width (and 3 is tight, but doable). So that makes 60s and 65s both much more expensive to sell since you'd have to charge enough downstream to make up for what you lose. For example, say the retail price is $5000 on the 55" model so the wholesale is $3000. If you can sell 6, you make $18000. On 60" TVs, you'd have to charge $4500 (4 x 4500), which would wind up with a retail price of about $6300. For 5", that's about 25% more money. The math is worse at 65", where the wholesale would need to $6000 and the retail would end up close to $8500.

This has long been a problem with LCDs in general and explains why mainstream 65" LCDs have been so hard to come by. Because there is no evidence at all that anyone is planning on making a 10G fab for OLED, the long-term hope is that not only does "printable" OLED making become real, but so does "roll-to-roll" OLED making, ending the days of substrate tyranny. But that's years and years away.

In the meantime, I suspect that the vast majority of OLED production will go toward the 55" and then we'll see a 65" down the road and perhaps a 70 or 75" (the latter being more likely, you get two cuts from the sheet either way) somewhat after that. The reason Samsung skipped the 70" is that Sharp can "just make them" on the 10G and Samsung is de facto indifferent between making a 70" or 75" from their fab. But note how much they charge for the 75". It's not remotely competitive with the Sharp 80" or really any Samsung display on a "per square inch" basis.

I look at it the other way. We (and LG) know that the market for premium tier televisions is tiny. They are estimating that the OLED market will be 600,000 units in 2014. The only way that this estimate makes any sense is if they believe they can get prices down substantially by next Christmas. There is just no chance of that happening if they are trying to sell a $8000 55" television next year. They might miss their yield targets, but my assumption is if they hit them that they will be able to bring their price down to somewhere close to $5000.

The capex for LG actually seems fairly cheap to me. $650 million for the capacity to produce 1.87 million units a year seems fairly reasonable. If/when they hit LCD type yields, the depreciation costs shouldnt be a major barrier to matching LCD pricing. At that point, the question will be how much they have managed to drive down material costs. The estimates I have seen indicate that OLED's can have a 20% bill of materials advantages versus LCD, but there are so many assumptions in that kind of projection that it is hard to have a lot of confidence in those numbers.

Look, you may well be correct here. I'm not sure they can sell anywhere near that many at anything more than $5,000 (or even at that). I'm somewhat less persuaded they intend to move that far down the price curve in one year, however. This makes me skeptical that LG intends to move anywhere near that many units next year. We're speculating, of course, and we'll know much more in 18-24 months.... To be completely honest, I'm a lot more intrigued by what happens in 2015 at this point, which I think promises to be a more interesting year as OLED will have to move within striking distance of LCD.
So I've long found those BOM estimates to be utterly pointless. One thing is that several of them relied on IGZO being cheaper than a-Si and, obviously, IGZO is going to be used by both LCD and OLED. Similarly, LG is using a virtually identical front filtering/glass combo on OLED and LCD. So the difference is basically in LED + light guides + BEFs + polarizers + LC layer vs. OLED layer. The OLED seems like it could ultimately be cheaper, but we'd be foolish to interpret fewer parts as automatically cheaper and given how many parts there are in common, something like 20% cheaper overall seems really, really far out there. Specifically, it's worth noting that everything unique to LCD in this scenario is really old stuff that has absolutely mammoth economics of scale behind it. And the vast majority of those items are parts that come from a supplier as is, bought as commodities. There is absolutely no yield issue or process (although there is some assembly involved with wiring in the edge-lit LED bars and then aligning them with the light guides) needed. It's basically stacking a few pieces of plastic and adding the LC step vs. the OLED step for OLEDs. So OLEDs get the advantage of skipping the "plastic" and the LEDs, but they have to undergo three separate vapor deposition steps. And otherwise, a lot of the steps are common (the TFT backplane making and the color filter litho).

Most LCD fabs are already fully depreciated and the processes in them probably run with ridiculously high yields. While it's true than a brand new fab in China might need some time to reach those yields, it will be at them before any of these OLED fabs are running at any kind of mass production capacity.

I don't want to dispute that someday OLEDs will be cheaper to make than LCDs are today, but it seems likely that we are talking some time around the decade's end if not later.

Samsung Targets OLED Television Sales in First Half Following LG. Feb. 18, 2013

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-19/samsung-plans-to-strengthen-lead-in-market-for-high-end-tv-sets.html

"Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest television maker, targets to start selling TVs using a technology allowing brighter and sharper images in the first half to extend its market lead.
The ultra-thin TVs will feature organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, Yoon Boo Keun, head of Samsung’s consumer electronics unit, said after a company briefing in Seoul today, without giving more details."

So it sounds like they gave some kind of press briefing after which they were asked about OLED. They mentioned only that they were still targeting the first half of this year. It's good to hear they haven't given up, but we have heard this sort of thing before so who knows?

Is there a reason the sheets have to be cut into equal size TVs? LG has said they will introduce 40" and 70" sizes which can conveniently sit side by side on a 2200x2500 sheet. They would still be expensive of course.

On the more speculative front, Samsung's 8g issues may actually lead to 65" sets. They are nearly ready for 6g size production and there have been serious discussions of using this for TVs if they can't resolve the 8g sizes soon. A 6g substrate would cut into 65" sets. It's not that it would be optimal but to some extent Samsung's reputation (and pride) is a bit on the line so they are going to want to get some TVs on the market sooner rather than later. Not saying it will happen but its being discussed and again they would be expensive.

No, there isn't. It's more common and much easier for certain steps, but not 100% required.

I'll trust your math. It's been a while since I looked at this. It's something like 2 x 70 and 3 x 40, if I recall.
That's certainly possible. The thing is I'm pretty sure Samsung's production issues are related to any large size screens. Now, that said, you are probably correct they won't ramp up the 8G until they get those resolved and could use the 6G and make a 65", which I believe would be much more compelling for a lot of people willing to spend the gigantic money needed to get involved with OLED.