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Übergizmo: As expected, the 31-inch OLED TV (which is monstrous when compared to regular OLED displays) has arrived at IFA 2010 and made a pretty big splash. You certainly won’t be able to take your eyes off a TV that measures all of just 2.9mm thin, and at that size, just about everything else in your home would look obese. While having a pretty small viewing real estate, it certainly won’t come cheap at £6,000 a pop as it hits the market in March next year. Of course, the proof is in the pudding as they say, so those who are fortunate enough to have that kind of money to bring home one of these puppies will definitely claim it is money well spent after having a look at its image quality. Features include Full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution and boasting an infinite contrast ratio that allows it to be viewed from virtually any angle.

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CNet: At a Japanese trade show on Thursday, an LG executive predicted that OLED panels will be cheaper than LCD ones by 2016.

Won Kim, LG’s vice president of OLED sales and marketing, also indicated that the company plans to release OLED TVs of 20 inches and above in 2010, 30 inches and above in 2011, and 40 inches and above in 2012.

“Forty-inch and larger OLED panels will be fairly expensive in 2012, but they will be available in the market,” said Kim. “OLED panels will cost less than LCD panels in 2016.”

Given the horrendously high price of OLED TVs so far, many videophiles will feel that the only proper response to such a claim is to engage in a vigorous beard-stroking session. We can’t quite suppress the small hope in our blackened hearts that the prophesy will prove true though, especially in light of the delightful LG OLED offerings we’ve seen so far.

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Electronista: At the CEATEC show in Japan recently, Mitsubishi Electric showed off a 155-inch prototype OLED TV that is modular and can be upsized at will.

It is composed of 720 OLED blocks, each sized at 1.5 square inches, but can be made bigger or smaller as necessary.

This could be used in outdoor displays, like in ballpark stadiums and on buildings for advertising. The modular nature also means the large screens can be curved in large installations, to follow the curvature of a building, wall or wherever else it’s installed.

Thanks to the OLED technology used in the creation of this system, brightness is said to be three times greater than in regular LCD TVs. Organic compounds in the pixels degrade over time, however, with the set’s life rated at 20,000 hours of continuous use.

Mitsubishi has not released pricing nor a shipping date for the modular OLED technology.

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Electronista: A larger Sony OLED TV will now have to wait until 2010 at the earliest, an apparent leak signaled today. Once on track for the end of the year, the set now isn’t slated to show until next year at the earliest.

Those reportedly passing on the information to the Wall Street Journal have portrayed it as an economic move, as Sony likely can’t afford to worsen its losses by selling a TV that has little to no profit, as it does with the 11-inch XEL-1.

The company posted its first annual loss in 14 years this year and blamed it partly on a sagging TV business affected by the poor world economy.

To shore up its efforts, the company has focused more attention on lower-end TVs and has seen CEO Sir Howard Stringer personally take over the presidency of the electronics group to help reorganize it.

A delay of this level would have little impact on Sony’s core health but would be a symbolic loss to rival LG, which now generates more revenue and is still on track to launch a 15-inch OLED TV as soon as December.

Sony hasn’t officially commented on the accuracy of the claims.

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Engadget: Getting tired of flexible OLED prototypes that are about as ready for retail as that cold fusion reactor your uncle Harry is building in his garage? Yeah, we are too, but it seems the industry is getting a little closer to reality, the latest step coming courtesy of Arizona State University’s Flexible Display Center and Universal Display.

Researchers at the pair have managed to produce flexible OLED displays using the same production techniques used to create standard, rather less bendy LCD displays, enabling the transistors that control the pixels to be applied to plastic, rather than the glass they typically find themselves embedded within.

They glue a piece of plastic onto glass, feed it through the LCD manufacturing process, then peel the two apart like a high-tech Fruit Roll-Up. That technique was used to create the 4.1-inch monochrome display shown above — which is for now just another prototype that won’t be showing up in any devices any time soon.

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EngadgetHD: Fall back Samsung, LG seems ready to deliver the medium sized OLED HDTV you aren’t in 2010, if this road from DigiTimes is followed tightly. 15-inch OLEDs by the end of this year, and 32-inchers next?

The battle seems to have taken a swing in one direction, but we’ll wait till there are displays available to declare a winner.

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EngadgetHD: Hey, wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute here! Last April, we caught Samsung asserting that it figured affordable medium-to-large size OLED TVs would be available in 2009 / 2010. Now, we’ve got Samsung Europe’s new President and CEO telling us that “mainstream” OLED sets are still five years out.

Believe it or not, said bigwig was quoted as saying that “when it comes to OLED, we have several issues to overcome in terms of technology and production cost,” and that it would be “at least four to five years before we see OLED in the market place.”

Of course, such a quip is to be expected given the quantity of dollars Sammy has poured into LCD, but we’re still a bit dismayed by the news. Hear that, entrepreneurs of the world? The time’s about right for an OLED-only startup to beat every last one of these traditional powerhouses to the punch.

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DisplaySearch: The OLED lighting market is setting the stage to take off in 2011, with OLED lighting revenues forecasted to surpass PMOLED displays in the 2013/2014 timeframe, reaching $6 billion by 2018, according to DisplaySearch’s newly-released report, OLED Lighting in 2009 and Beyond: The Bright Future.

“The unique features of OLED lighting are inspiring the imagination of designers. OLED lighting devices emit from the surface, can be made flexible/rollable, and even transparent like a window or reflective like a mirror.

OLED lighting is thin, rugged, lightweight, and has fast switch-on times, wide operating temperatures, no noise and is environmentally friendly. The power efficiency of OLED lighting has also improved dramatically in recent years,” said Jennifer Colegrove, PhD, Director of Display Technologies at DisplaySearch.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in OLED lighting, especially in Europe, the US, and Japan. Although OLED displays have been in mass production for about a decade, OLED lighting just started sampling and small volume production. This is due to the fact that OLED displays and OLED lighting face different challenges,” added Dr. Colegrove.

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Gizmodo: When consumer budgets are tight, companies tend to back off the horrendously priced luxury goods. But according to the OLED Association, it’s not poor consumers that are holding up new, bigger OLED sets—it’s poor manufacturers.

Ars interviewed Barry Young, Managing Director of the OLED Association, and managed to get a pretty good read on where the OLED industry is, and more importantly, where it’s headed.

The nebulous long term projections about OLED dominance still stand, but the short term prospects are, in a word, shitty. Here’s why: Some major manufacturers have gotten to be pretty good at building the small OLED TVs we’re used to seeing.

Samsung is about to introduce a 14.1-inch pipsqueak to go against Sony’s 11-inch wonder midget, and prices for these mini-sets should start dropping soon enough.

Unfortunately, these small OLED screens are the largest functional television displays anyone is capable of mass-producing right now. Sparing you the mind-numbing technical details, manufacturers are being faced with two equally unattractive (read: expensive) options for building TV-sized OLED TVs, like the one Samsung showed off last year: either devise an entirely new manufacturing process, which would require the invention of new techniques and machines for fabrication, or pursue a different type of OLED panel.

Both options would circumvent the current size restrictions, but both options are extremely expensive. In the current climate, companies like Samsung can’t be certain that such risky investments will pay off fast enough, and for the time being, investment capital is scarce.

Answering a question about Samsung’s plan for a 32″ OLED set, Young could only say this: “How soon Samsung will do their next generation will be affected by the downturn.” In other words, sorry 2009. And 2010

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CNET: The Sony XEL-1 OLED TV is a beautiful display. Its contrast ratio makes pictures pop, it’s thinner than a credit card, but it’s too small, and too expensive. But it’s been a year since it was introduced in January 2008, and as of today, it still has no competitors. Where are they?

Though we’ve been long promised that the era of OLED (organic light-emitting diode) TVs is just around the corner, it appears we’re going to have to wait even longer. The major players in electronics who have the resources to build OLED TVs have been whacked by the global financial meltdown along with the rest of us. In other words, the timing to jump-start a brand new TV technology is terrible.

“The cost to manufacture them remains high and will remain high until someone’s willing to take the risk to develop their own manufacturing capacity on a large scale,” explained Paul Gagnon, TV market analyst for DisplaySearch. “Risky investments are not something most of these companies are looking at right now.”

Samsung, Sony, LG Electronics, Toshiba, and Panasonic have at various points promised to make OLED TVs. Only one of them, Sony, has done so. But even Sony’s is hardly what most people would call a viable option. It’s not the standard size of a TV, and isn’t exactly priced for a recession. The other firms have only prototypes to show. There was some hope that Samsung and Sony would be able to release larger OLED TVs this year. But if they were, they’d have brought them to CES in January.

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Telegraph: The world’s thinnest television goes on sale this week in Britain, measuring a mere 3mm, no thicker than a pound coin. Sony’s Bravia XEL promises to transform the television industry, despite its high price, by offering viewers the crispest, most colourful pictures ever.

The XEL is the first Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) television to come to market in Europe and uses completely new technology from previous flat screen models such as LCD and Plasma. The contrast ratio on a good LCD television is about 30,000 to one. On the OLED it is 1 million to one.

OLED televisions were first unveiled as a prototype a year ago, but Sony is the first company to start selling them in shops.

However, because the technology is still so expensive and fragile, the biggest screen available is just 11 inches wide.

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Electricpig: No sooner has Sharp slagged off Blu-ray recorders than it’s sticking the knife into another bit of next gen HDTV tech, saying that OLED TVs are simply “not ready for prime time”. Sharp won’t be bringing out an OLED TV anytime soon, so what’s it going to concentrate on instead?

Sharp CEO Doug Koshima was on hand at CES in Las Vegas at the company’s keynote, where he was quizzed on the future of flatscreen HDTV. Koshima said that while OLED (organic light emitting diode) technology is interesting, it’s “not ready for prime time”.

Instead, Koshima says Sharp plans to concentrate on LED backlighting for LCD TVs, opening a brand new factory in Japan by 2010 to churn them all out, and while we were slightly disappointed by the news, he did unveil several brand sparkling new TVs to make up for it, including the world’s first TV with Blu-ray built in.

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