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CNet: Despite intense competition, price cuts and a shaky economy, it’s going to be another good year for the electronics industry, predicts Sony’s Stan Glasgow.

Glasgow, president of Sony Electronics, said that orders from retailers are strong once again this year. Consumers are snapping up high-definition TVs, but also digital cameras and video cameras.

Consumers also know that regular TV is going away.

“I still think the biggest thing going on is the analog shutdown in 2009,” he said.

Other notes from Glasgow:

-Sony has released a slim 11-inch OLED TV in Japan, but it will take time for the technology to become a mass market phenomenon. “The yields are difficult. The technology is difficult,” he said. Blue light, in particular, can be difficult to control on OLED TVs. “It is going to take a number of years” before OLED TVs become mainstream,” he said.

-Expect the Japanese giant to be more open to outside ideas. Sony has said this for years, but this time they really mean it. The latest Sony Reader and some of its MP3 players come with slots for SD cards as well as cards based around Sony’s Memory Stick standard.

-Blu-ray will win. But I guess you expected that. Sony is one of the big backers of the Blu-ray format.

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Tech.co.uk: Samsung’s executive vice president, Ho Kyoon Chung, has said that he expects 42-inch OLED televisions to be on the market in three years’ time.

According to Tech-On, Chung said that by 2010 the OLED panel market will be worth $3.7 billion a year.

“OLED panels have opened the new era of organic optoelectronics,” said Chung. “Not only displays but also new applications such as OLED lighting systems, organic electro-luminescent power generators and organic sensors will emerge in the near future.

Speaking at the FPD International 2007 Forum, Chung said that despite a slow start, OLED TVs will become cheaper and more popular in just a very short space of time.

“Following small panels used in 2007, 3.5 to 7-inch panels will be applied to ultra mobile PCs, for example, in 2008. Then we will realise 14, 15 and 21-inch panels in 2009 and large 40 to 42-inch full HD OLED TVs in 2010.”

OLED (organic light emitting diode) television technology could ultimately replace LCD and plasma TVs in our living rooms. OLED panels don’t require a backlight so they’re very energy efficient and will be able to produce much deeper colours than LCD.

Samsung isn’t the only player in the OLED game. At this year’s CEATEC show in Japan, Sony showed off a tiny 11-inch TV that was just 3mm thick, plus a 27-inch prototype using the same OLED technology.

For the moment, OLED technology is stuck with many of the problems which afflicted LCD in its early days. It’s very hard to build OLED panels of any real size, and even small panels are very expensive to produce.

Toshiba too says it plans to sell a 30-inch OLED TV by 2009.

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Mobile Magazine: What do you get when you grab the twisting and turning motion found on the Nokia N93, shove it into a boxier casing and toss in a touchscreen display? The answer, it seems, is the Sagem Porsche P9521.

It’s obviously not the thinnest phone on the block, but it could be one of the coolest. On the front cover — which initially opens like a clamshell, but can later twist all the way around and back down again if you’d like — are two very important words: Porsche Design. That’s why there’s an unmistakable appeal to the Sagem Porsche P9521.

For the tech-oriented geeks in the audience, you’ll notice a small preview screen on the front cover, but on the inside is a 2.2-inch active matrix OLED touchscreen. Other features include a fingerprint reader, A2DP Bluetooth, and a 3.2 megapixel camera with dual LED lights.

The price for this limited production wonder? A cool 1200 Euros.

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AV Zombie: Samsung has stated that it does not believe Sony will be able to deliver on its promise to begin consumer sales of OLED screens this year.

Sony has caused rivals to accelerate thier plans for OLED screen development, after pledging that it will begin sales of eleven-inch OLED monitors before the end of the year.

Organic Light Emitting Diode technology allows high resolution displays to be created from wafer-thin panels. As OLED screens are self-illuminating there is no need for an LCD-style backlight.

Yoo Eui-jin, vice president and chief of Samsung SDI’s OLED team, said “I hope Sony will really do it, but considering circumstances, I doubt they will be able to start selling it this year. Maybe it would be possible for them to make a hundred or a thousand units as artifacts, but no more than that.”

Samsung is currently pushing ahead with plans to introduce AM (Active Matrix) OLED screens for mobile phones and portable devices, rather than TV.

Sasmung SDI claims to have developed the world’s thinnest 2.2-inch AM-OLED. Measuring just 0.53 millimeters thick, the company says that it is lighter, brighter and more energy-efficient than LCD. Mass-production of the tiny panel is expected to begin this summer.

However, for OLED to really move forward, panel makers have to improve yield efficiency. Samsung admits that only four out of ten AM-OLED panels are currently suitable for use.

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BBC News: Governments should tax plasma screen televisions because of the large amount of energy they consume, according to a leading expert on climate change. 

Professor Paul Ekins, who studies the economics of climate change, said taxing plasma screens would reflect their “greater climate change burden”.

This would encourage development and take-up of more energy efficient diode screens, Professor Ekins said.

He said government could label energy hungry appliances as a first step.

Plasma televisions, which are 50% bigger than their cathode-ray tube equivalents, consume about four times more energy, according to the government-funded Energy Saving Trust.

A cathode-ray tube TV costs about £25 per year to run and accounts for 100kg of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, whereas a plasma TV costs about £100 per year and accounts for 400kg of CO2.

But some researchers say exact comparisons are difficult because of the size difference between plasmas and other screen types: cathode-ray tube and Liquid Crystal Display (LCD).

“At the very least you might think that government would provide some differential incentives to accelerate the development of more energy efficient diode screens and encourage their take-up,” said Professor Ekins, co-director of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC).

“Once plasma screens are bought, they are likely to be there for five years at a minimum, perhaps 10 years, perhaps longer.”

Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) screens do not require a backlight and thus draw less power. But observers say the technology needs to overcome several technological hurdles, such as the limited lifetimes of some of the materials used in them.

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Gizmodo: Here is Sony’s new OLED display. It’s an obscene 9mm thick yet it packs a 1080p resolution along with a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio.

Just as a recap, OLED displays are thinner and brighter than their LCD counterparts and they use less power. Sony was showing this beauty off at this week’s Display 2007 Expo in Japan.

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Yahoo: Japanese electronics giant Sony Corp. plans to start selling small televisions this year using a screen technology that is a contender for the next-generation screen of flat-screen TVs, a company spokeswoman said Thursday.

Sony plans to begin selling an 11-inch television using an organic electroluminescent screen by the year’s end, spokeswoman Mami Imada said. OEL screens are already used in smaller applications such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants and camcorders. Sony believes their product would be the first such television to come to market, Imada added.

The screens make use of the self-luminscent properties of organic materials. They use less power than comparable liquid crystal display screens because they don’t use a backlight, and are also much thinner — the screen in Sony’s planned 11-inch OEL TV will be 3 millimeters thick. (…)

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Newlaunches: CRT, LCD, PDP, DLP, LCoS, OLED, SED these are technologies available on the buffet menu today. But if Sony has its way the new curry to delight all will be the FED technology. (…)

To show off their point, Sony recently displayed a new 19.2-inch 1280 × 960 pixel, 400cd/m2 panel demonstrating the technology, with an impressive 20,000:1 contrast. With lesser power consumption and a super-thin frame, the new TV will have all that it takes to woo the customer. (…)

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EETimes: A novel display technology that claims to be simpler in construction than an LCD and better performing than organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) or plasma appears to be inching closer to commercialization. UniPixel Displays Inc. developed its Time Multiplexed Optical Shutter (TMOS) technology to address display requirements in avionics applications, particularly heads-down cockpit deployments. The Woodlands, Texas, company has engineering prototypes and expects “to have the display in a television application by the fourth quarter,” said CFO James Tassone. (…)

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AV zombie: OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screens are beginning to convince as potential alternatives to LCD, although even their biggest advocates admit there’s a long way to go before they become a commercial proposition.

Sony recently used the CES expo to show this 27-inch 1920 x1080 resolution OLED prototype (pictured) which boasts a 1 million-to-one contrast ratio. However engineers confirmed that they have yet to solve problems associated with a short screen life.
Super-slim OLED panels dim and die far earlier than conventional flatscreen technologies.

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Gadgetcandy: Sony has snapped out some Twiggy-esque goggle boxes at CES. The prototypes are so skinny that their collective BMI’s would definitely fail to reach 18. Thank goodness, they’re not catwalk models then…
They’re wafer thin because they house new OLED technology and give brilliant quality images as well as looking perfect from every angle.

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CNet: Sony is looking at ways to bring flat-panel TVs based around organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer and Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow said in an interview.

The company is currrently showing off a 27-inch OLED panel, along with other, small OLED screens at the CES Show in Las Vegas. Still, a lot of work remains, and both executives emphasized that Sony is not announcing products or a definitive commitment to OLED TVs.

The company, for instance, has to figure out how to mass-manufacture them at a price consumers are willing to pay. SED, a TV format promoted by Toshiba, has been delayed several times. Critics say that when it comes out, Toshiba will have challenges making SED, which stands for surface conduction electron emitter display, competitive in price with plasma or LCD.

Materials in an OLED display emit light when an electrical current is applied. Because of their luminescent nature, OLED displays don’t require a backlight, consume less power and can result in thinner screens than LCDs. To date, manufacturers have used OLEDs for screens inside phones and MP3 players.

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