Advanced Television

Samsung will launch OLEDs in 2012

May 11, 2012

By Chris Forrester

Organic Light-Emitting Diode-based (OLED) TV screens are a wonder to behold. Brilliant to view, highly-efficient and inexpensive to run once you have paid the eye watering ticket price!

Samsung says it will commercialise its – to date – prototype manufacturing of OLED screens later this year, and introduce a model onto its South Korean domestic market. A proposed high-end 55” unit (matching Samsung’s current best-selling 55” Smart LED units) is likely to cost an eye-watering $9,000, some three-times the price of Samsung’s current high-end models.

Samsung’s head of TV business said it will take another two to three years for the new screen technology to go mainstream. This gives Samsung first-mover advantage in manufacturing these large-sized screens, although nobody yet expects sales to make much of an impact on current LCD/LED set sales.

DisplaySearch, for example, suggests some 250m TVs will ship worldwide in 2012, and this is much the same number that shipped in 2011 and 2010. OLED, to date, has taken and will continue to take a tiny, tiny slice of those sales – 50,000 sets or less, says DisplaySearch – new sets from Samsung and LG, and perhaps Apple.

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