OLED TV technology goes mainstream

At the Consumer Electronics Show, there’s always one technology or product line that seems to rocket to the top of the market. At last year’s CES, tablet computers were popular choices.

At CES 2012, which concluded last week, a common choice for the various “best of” awards for the show went to an OLED television. OLED, short for organic light emitting diode, is a technology that is similar to LCD and plasma technologies found in today’s flat-panel TVs. However, OLED promises better display results and better performance than those two mature display technologies.

Judging by some of the screens showcased at CES 2012, OLED is well on its way to grabbing a successful place in the market.

One of the more interesting aspects of OLED TV technology is that its current emergence in the TV market isn’t because the technology suddenly was invented. In reality, OLED technology was created in the 1980s by Eastman Kodak and Cambridge University. However, OLED is finally beginning to emerge as a realistic option on the HDTV market. OLED TV technologies have long been able to match the thin size of LCD and plasma TVs, but they haven’t been economical to create at large sizes.

That begins to change in 2012.

Companies that are planning to bring large OLED TVs to the market in 2012, such as LG and Samsung, are promising 55-inch TVs featuring OLED technology.

When trying to determine the future for OLED TVs in the market, it’s worth considering that the technology behind OLED is more like plasma technology than LCD. Neither OLED nor plasma TVs require a backlight, whereas an LCD TV does. That means that the image quality with an OLED screen is going to be very close to that of a plasma screen, which is a better image quality than LCD TVs. OLEDs make use of faster refresh rates, a wider viewing angle and a lower power usage than LCDs.

The ability to showcase a greater contrast -- displaying deeper blacks -- has been one area where plasmas dominate LCD screens, making them especially popular for viewing movies. However, OLEDs do an even better job with contrast than do plasmas, which will help OLEDs to move to the front of the market. The OLED TV that LG featured at CES includes the three traditional pixels -- red, green, and blue -- along with a fourth pixel, white. This addition improves the brightness of the overall image, which should give OLED technologies even more of an advantage in display quality.

So why have LCD screen technologies continued to lead the market? One reason is that LCD screens do a better job than plasma when there is any sort of external light in the room, such as from a window. Plasma TVs are popular in home theater rooms, where there typically are no windows. Also, because the image quality difference between the three technologies isn’t great enough to completely justify the larger prices that plasma and OLED have carried, LCD remains a popular choice. LCD and plasma TVs are close in price, but LCDs remain a little less expensive.

OLED TVs will be significantly higher in price when they’re introduced in volume later this year. LG and Samsung expect their 55-inch OLED TVs, which will appear in the second half of 2012, to carry a cost of several thousand dollars.

However, with OLED technologies beginning to mature, that price difference is certainly going to shrink pretty quickly in the next few years. During presentations at CES, LG predicted that it will be able to manufacture OLED TVs as inexpensively as LCD TVs by 2016. Once that occurs, OLED should begin to dominate the market. The possibility that OLED technologies may appear in other products, such as lighting, will hasten the maturity process.

Once you combine the technological advantages of OLED TVs with a great price point, it will surely be the choice of most consumers, even though it’s difficult to go wrong with LCD or plasma. Bigger, brighter, sharper and cheaper: For those who love large flat-screen TV technologies, the news just keeps getting better and better.