HDTV Almanac - Big OLED TVs Coming…

[alfredpoor]

I know, I should be excited. I was hoping that maybe there’d be a viable 32″ OLED HDTV on the market sometime this year, but I wasn’t holding my breath. And here comes the news that LG will be showing a 55″ monster of an OLED HDTV at CES in Las Vegas next week.
Fifty-five freakin’ [...]

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[lmarks]

Alfred, you've ignored the possibility that these large OLED displays could be built by tiling.

Laurence Marks

[jordanm]

CEA says initial price is $8,000 but expect under $5,000 w/in 6 months. Even $5K is too much for a 55' TV. Next...

[Rodolfo]

Alfred,

It is ironic how this OLED matter went back and for in your columns.

On March 18, 2011 you published a column declaring that LG’s large OLED panel announcement was not true, and I made you aware that in the press meeting I attended two months earlier at CES 2011 LG executives confirmed several times that there will be a 50+ inches OLED in 2012.

Your “not true” column was mysteriously deleted from your “HDTV Professor Almanac” directory and from HDTV Magazine columns directory, but I found a reference to it in the “column commentary” section in the magazine’s forum (nothing ever dies in Internet):

viewtopic.php?f=117&t=15013

Later you issued a column claiming confusion:

viewtopic.php?f=117&t=15077

Now that LG has actually announced and showed the OLED panel, this new column of yours appears to again diminish the OLED introduction effort, based on SED’s unfortunate destiny, and your guess of initial high pricing, which always happens, especially in quality products.

As I said on my comments on the recent press release:

http://www.hdtvmagazine.com/news/2011/1 ... market.php

Regardless of its initial price I welcome this OLED effort to bring image quality back to the panel market. I requested LG more information about pricing/availability/specs, and will see the set at press day at CES 2012 on Monday. If I recall correctly, the 55” panel is 4mm thick and weights just 16+ lbs; that by itself is stunning. It also uses a 4th (white) sub-pixel in addition to the typical RGB; I expect LG would explain the technical use of that pixel (similar to the Quatron yellow pixel of Sharp).

I have my mind open to what the OLED technology could do to many home theater enthusiasts that demand hi-end image quality, a market that should not be ignored even after the departure of the much revered Pioneer Elite Kuro, which left little option regarding quality imaging in panels, other than some top-of-the-line plasmas from Panasonic and Samsung, and the new Sharp Elite, which showed better than most LCDs to my eyes but unfortunately is still based on LCD technology with its inherent weaknesses.

This OLED technology and product deserves a break. If the product would actually be released to the public, price and availability would adjust down as everything else in this industry, and even if not, there will be clients for it if the quality is good ( I paid $8000 for my first Pioneer Elite in 1998, and many did as well).

I will see how good is this OLED demo on Monday at the Bellagio after LGs press conference, but my first reaction is that I prefer a $5K-10K OLED than a $6K-8K LCD Sharp Elite any day, although that set with local LED lighting showed a quality image that is a step forward on LCD technology (but not as good as the Pioneer Elite Kuro). The LG OLED has the potential to bring the importance of image quality back to a market of panels unfortunately dominated by massively pushed LCDs.


Best Regards,

Rodolfo La Maestra

[lmarks]

Regardless of its initial price I welcome this OLED effort to bring image quality back to the panel market. I requested LG more information about pricing/availability/specs, and will see the set at press day at CES 2012 on Monday. If I recall correctly, the 55” panel is 4mm thick and weights just 16+ lbs; that by itself is stunning. It also uses a 4th (white) sub-pixel in addition to the typical RGB; I expect LG would explain the technical use of that pixel (similar to the Quatron yellow pixel of Sharp).

Rodolfo,

The use of a unfiltered (white) fourth pixel is well-known in the area of LCDs, primarily promoted by PenTile. The notion (in LCDs) is that most of the light from the backlight is lost in effective aperture, polarization, and color filtering. A brighter image can be achieved with less power if pixels include an unfiltered white sub-pixel which transmits when the pixel is highly illuminated. See for example:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all ... 6822&tag=1
http://pentileblog.com/uncategorized/wh ... fficiency/
http://pentileblog.com/lcd/why-bother-w ... available/

It makes sense that OLED displays could achieve greater brightness (and contrast ratio) by using the same technique. We must also consider that OLEDs have limited lifetimes. The lifetime of an OLED display can be extended by driving the R, G, and B OLEDs at lower power and augmenting them with a white OLED.

Laurence Marks

[Rodolfo]

Thanks Lawrence,

The reason why I will be looking for a technical clarification from LG Display on Monday’s demo of their 55” OLED panel regarding their use of the 4th white sub-pixel (in addition to the typical RGB sub-pixel array) is because typical applications of the PenTile technology you mention are actually using RGBG sub-pixel arrays for AM/OLED, not RGBW as you well indicated some LCD devices use.

As you know, LCD, as a transmissive display technology, uses the white sub-pixel PenTile technology for a higher aperture ratio to increase the overall transmissivity of the LCD panel, saving energy while getting a brighter image.

However, the RGBG PenTile technology applicable to AM/OLED actually uses the extra G sub-pixel to decrease current density and still obtain improved brightness without damaging the organic layers of the panel, making them last much longer than they did a few years ago, which favors cost and panel application for prolonged TV viewing purposes.

The blue in particular was reported to have improved to 25000+ hrs to reach half-life, compared to several times that half-life-span for the red and green. While 25k hrs is comparatively lower than the life span of LCD and plasma technology, even the blue would last about 17 years at 4 hrs per day to reach half-life; in practical terms, the owner of the panel most probably would have looked for a replacement much before that point considering the rapid growth of quality imaging devices the industry experienced over the past two decades.

Thanks again for your input Lawrence,

Best Regards,

Rodolfo La Maestra

[lmarks]

Rodolfo,

Four hours per day is reasonable for home theater. But lots of TVs are run 18-24 hours a day in convenience stores, sports bars, gyms, and other venues. 25K hours is only around 3 years at 24 hours/day usage.

I probably should have given a better reference for RGBW than PenTile. PenTile is best known for RGBG which is optimized not for brightness but to give the impression of higher resolution. PenTile does, however, also get involved with RGBW. See
http://www.nouvoyance.com/technology.html
http://pentileblog.com/tag/rgbw/

Laurence Marks

[Rodolfo]

Laurence,

Regarding “lots of TVs are run 18-24 hours a day”, those installations may better find the suitable technology, such as a wide angle of view plasma, not a 15% view LCD, and certainly postpone OLED consideration until price and life-span is more competitive for such environments, and hopefully it will, there is no need to put OLED on a straight jacket before is lunched because of certain extreme conditions of use.

We can argue about all kinds of math of viewing hrs per day on many environments and of people living on their couch, but 17 yrs at 4 hrs per day to reach half-life is more than reasonable for most, from a product that is not even introduced yet, and is in the road to improve life-spam.

Regarding PenTile, again, it is actually known for both RGBW for LCD and RGBG for AM/OLED. You were referring to a W PenTile application in LG Display’s OLED when the W is typically for LCD applications, as the documents you provided also confirm.

In regard to the G “impression of higher resolution” that is only one factor that uses the human capabilities of vision, but as I said, having an extra G in an OLED TV may help in longevity of the organic layer, especially the 25K blue, by not having to drive the panel harder, which in my opinion is where the weight of the benefit is, considering the longevity weakness of the current OLED even when is much better than 2010.

We do not even know if LG Display would use the W as the PenTile method or just add a W sub-pixel and have 4 equally sized sub-pixels RGBW, the existence of a W could end up something similar to what Sharp Quatron did with the yellow subpixel, and LG would not then apply PenTile's color trade offs to this set, we do not know that, I will find that out on Monday, they told me yesterday that they are not disclosing more information than the one issued in the press release, which is not unusual with break-thru product announcements.

Concerning your “PenTile gets involved in RGBW”, I repeat, “yes”, but that is for an LCD application and you are posting about using PenTile RGBW on an OLED thread indicating that W is widely known, the links you provided would explain their difference in purpose.

Best Regards,

Rodolfo La Maestra

[alfredpoor]

Rodolfo, I don't deny that LG will show a 55" OLED HDTV this week, and I happily admit that this is well in advance of what I thought was possible a year ago. Last year at this time, polysilicon annealing was not available for substrates larger than Gen 4, and metal oxide semiconductor backplanes still had many, many problems to solve. So I'm thrilled to see that LG has made so much progress. I've long been a booster of OLED technology, and have followed it very closely for more than 10 years.

Having said that, a product demonstration with no pricing or ship date is a technology demonstration, not a product announcement. Other people can speculate on the price and ship date (just as they are doing with abandon for the Apple TV), but until I can walk into a store and give them my credit card and walk out with the product, it's not a product. It's smoke. I've seen too many technology products that have had cover stories and Editors Choice awards but that never shipped, to get too excited about a demonstration.

Furthermore, an $8,000 HDTV is not a practical product. Sure, there are home theater enthusiasts who pay $100,000 or more on their systems, but that's not the market that I address. (And we've had that discussion before, too.) As Scott Ramirez of Toshiba used to say (and I expect that he still does), there is no HDTV market above $2,5000. Yes, there are products above that price point, but you can't make a business out of it (unless you're Runco). In this age of 55" HDTVs priced under $1,000, I'm not sure if maybe the upper limit is even lower now. So even at $5,000, a 55" OLED is barely more practical than Sony's XEL-1 OLED TV at $2,000 (which was not even HD).

I'm ready to be amazed if LG comes out with more details this week at CES, but I don't expect that they will. And if they don't, I'll save my evaluation of the product until I can see a production unit, and be able to judge its value for the price asked.

Alfred