Beats Sony's version by 20 inches

Dec 27, 2007 14:51 GMT  ·  By

Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED)-based displays are an important part of most manufacturer's product roadmap, since they represent one of the best bets for future success in this industry. And one of the latest and most surprising announcements regarding this specific field comes from Samsung, who is touting the development of a very large OLED display.

Thus, as Marie-France Han reports for Reuters, it seems that the Korean company (or rather, its specialized display-manufacturing division, Samsung SDI), has managed to develop a large, 31-inch OLED display, which will be showcased in only a few weeks' time, at CES 2008.

As Samsung states, the 31-inch module is only 4.3 mm thick, or one-tenth of a typical liquid crystal display panel, and is also quite economical, since it requires less than half the electricity needed for a 32-inch LCD screen. Furthermore, the company also declared that the lifespan of its display is 35,000 hours, the best performance among existing AM-OLEDs.

As some of you might know, this announcement is very important from two separate points of view. First of all, it's quite unexpected, since Samsung has announced a while back its OLED development roadmap, which indicated that OLED displays of this size were slated to be developed at some point in 2009-2010, with only smaller-sized versions arriving up until then.

However, it looks Samsung has decided to speed things up, probably due to the fact that one of its greatest rivals on the display market, the Japanese company Sony, has already released an 11-inch OLED TV set, currently sold in Japan in limited numbers (around 2000 units per month).

Leaving Samsung's surprise aside for a moment, it's important to note the fact that OLED displays seem to represent an increasingly attractive subject for the display manufacturers out there, as they require a lot less power in order to operate, while delivering similar (if not superior) image quality. Actually, it's quite probable that OLEDs will probably represent the future of displays, and at some point will completely replace "antiquated" PDPs and LCD panels. But just how soon this moment will come....it's still a mystery.

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