The warranty period against image burn-in for active-matrix OLED panels is expected to exceed 2,000 hours in 2010, and these panels will be available for laptops, according to Woo Jong Lee, vice president of the Mobile Display Marketing Team of Samsung SDI Co Ltd.
Lee explained about the future availability of active-matrix OLED panels in mobile devices. First, their advantages such as a wide operating temperature range, an excellent compatibility with touch screens, a low environmental load at disposal and a high recyclability. Then, he noted that OLED panels meeting the demands of product assembly manufacturers will be used in laptops, which have the most demanding requirements, as early as 2010.
He claimed that touch-screens will be the standard in mobile devices and that OLED panels have a higher noise resistance than TFT LCD panels because they are driven by DC power. He said though the ultimate form is in-cell touch panel, capacitance touch-screen will be the mainstream for the next five or six years.
Lee pointed out that entertainment content, especially videos, will be killer applications due to the increase in wireless communication speed. Under such circumstances, OLED panels will be available for use in smartphones and small mobile PCs equipped with larger screens. He said the company is expecting 5-inch or larger OLED panels to be the mainstream in 2009 or 2010.
Also, Lee forecast that OLED panels will be priced at about 1.1 times the price of LED panels by 2015 and that 28% of all laptops will feature an OLED panel. Samsung is promoting various kinds of projects utilizing a paper-thin OLED panel embeddable in passports and cards, a car navigation system with a transparent OLED panel installed on the vehicle windshield and so forth. He noted that Samsung will be ready to offer a greater diversity of applications in about two to three years.
