Feedback on display progress

Printed Electronics review intends to facilitate feedback to give all views. Based on a recent article we published, Stewart Hough, President of ATA responded with the following points. The article covered Flexible OLED display progress . This is not necessarily the view of IDTechEx , but it is an interesting input.

 

1. The $3B in revenue mark for OLEDs has been 4+ years in the future for the last 5 years and has now slipped even further.

 

2. No commercially viable mainstream market application for OLEDs is being considered as the technology is not competitive with LCDs, maybe in 3-5 years, if ever.

 

3. PLED is still 2 years behind small molecule and the material set cannot deliver display performance against LCDs. PLED AM displays have not looked very good - defects, color saturation, luminance. There are no AM PLED displays in production and no major plans within the next 2 years, at least SM has released product. PLED is behind in efficiency, color saturation, lifetime, brightness, and most of all, the rate of its improvement lags behind the rate of improvement of LCDs.

 

4. The fix for PLEDs is something like catching a fish. PLED present licensees will never be major display suppliers.

 

5. Flexible OLEDs remains a pipe dream; the demonstrations to date will not feed mainstream display markets, perhaps some niche ones in the next 3 years. The entry to your article is decidedly provocative in this regard.

 

6. The future of OLEDs is directly in the hands of LCD makers - the worst place possible for a new technology.

 

 

At IDTechEx, we think there has been a huge amount of OLED development and other technologies have been missed, e.g. electroluminescent displays which have been in the wilderness for 3 decades are emerging on bill boards and posters where they truly are flexible and electrochromic ones are ultra cheap and can go where displays normally cannot go e.g. packaging. We think OLEDs will not replace lcds in the short-medium term but will need to find applications where lcds cannot go, e.g. flexibility although some lcds can now achieve this.

 

Learn more as we cover the applications and all these technologies at www.printelec.com .