Ok, now that we've piqued your curiosity with all this information about OLEDs, you're probably wondering when you can buy a television set with this phenomenal display. The engineer in me takes your question, "When will OLED TV's be available?" and turns it into more questions

• When will the technology be ready? Televisions have requirements for color gamut, resolution, usable life, etc.
• When will the technology be ready to make large displays, i.e. bigger than 27" in diagonal?
• When will the cost be acceptable to the average consumer?

Today, OLEDs are fairly common in small displays for portable electronics, including MP3 players and subdisplays in cell phones. These displays are typically passive matrix OLEDs (PMOLEDs). The annual revenue for PMOLEDs is approximately $500M worldwide. Kodak enables the manufacture of PMOLED display, with licensees numbering more than 15 worldwide.

AMOLEDs are required for television displays, due to their larger size and high-resolution video content. In 2003, Kodak launched the World's First AMOLED Digital Camera, the LS633. Today, OLED televisions are available in small-to-medium sizes from Sony (11-inch XEL-1) and Kodak (ELITE Portable TV).

One of the concerns for OLED technology has been the lifetime of the blue color, which has historically been less than red and green. Over time, this results in very dim blue pixels and shifting of the display toward yellow. Kodak has been developing new architectures to overcome this issue, in particular a very stable White OLED formulation, which can be used in combination with a color filter array to produce a full-color display. Kodak's White OLED architecture boasts a lifetime in excess of 100,000 hours. There are 8,766 hours in a year, so these devices are very stable. Another advantage of the White OLED approach is the elimination color shift over time due to one color dying out more quickly than the others.

Kodak's White OLED technology also meets or exceeds television standards for color gamut, image quality, brightness, contrast ratio and resolution. At the 2008 Society for Information Display (SID) Trade Show, Kodak demonstrated the World's First 100% NTSC White OLED Display showcasing Kodak deep blue. The display received many compliments about its beauty from show attendees.

Conventionally, full-color OLED displays have been fabricated by depositing individual red, green and blue emitters through a precisely aligned mask. The mask is a very thin piece of metal full of holes for the material to pass through to the substrate, similar to an art stencil. Using a precision mask presents many problems for manufacturing large displays, as it becomes exceedingly difficult to make, align and handle the masks as they approach the size of a queen size mattress.

The White OLED process, on the other hand, uses maskless technology, which is scalable to the glass sizes required to make television displays. An integrated color filter array is used, to produce full-color displays. Kodak uses an innovative design, RGBW, where a fourth unfiltered sub pixel is used to reduce the power consumption by ~50% in typical usage.

 

As with all new technologies, the cost is initially high. It takes time to develop new manufacturing methods to lower cost and improve yield. Kodak is pioneering new technologies to improve yield, like Global Mura Compensation (GMC) , and reduce manufacturing cost, like Kodak Vapor Injection Source Technology (VIST). GMC technology has been demonstrated on small displays in the Kodak ELITE Portable TV. The scalability of GMC to larger panels has been proven with the introduction of Kodak's AMOLED Wireless Frame. Our technologies provide the tools necessary to for OLED manufacturers to begin investing in Kodak White OLED technology. This will help bring affordable, large-scale OLED products to the consumer within the next few years.