Although OLED displays have been used mostly in the case of portable devices up until recently, they're slowly emerging as the most likely solution for future TVs and monitors and some pretty good competitors for current LCDs. And the Japanese company Sony has already taken the first steps in this direction, launching their first all-OLED TV set, XEL-1, back in October and announcing the fact that this thing will hit the shelves at some point in December.

However, it would seem that things are a lot worse than anyone expected, at least from the consumers' point of view. Thus, the company's latest statement on this issue confirms the 1st of December as the official release date, but informs us that only 2000 units have been made available at retail stores across Japan for the time being, and that this number won't be supplemented until January.

Furthermore, to make things even worse, it would seem that out of the 2000 units mentioned above, 700 will be used solely for marketing purposes, namely they'll be showcased in the stores' exhibition areas, leaving a "grand" total of 1300 units available for actual sales.

As you might know from our previous article on the subject, the most important selling point of Sony's latest development is represented by the 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, but the device also provides other interesting features as well, as for example the 960 x 540 resolution, the supports for input resolutions up to 1080p, with an effective size of the display of around 251 mm x 141 mm x 287 mm.

The device also includes a tuner for terrestrial digital broadcasts, HDMI, USB and LAN (10BASE-T/100BASE-TX Ethernet) connectors, as well as a headphone jack and is accompanied by a remote control and an antenna connection cable.

Another important piece of information released by Sony is the actual pricing of the OLED TV. Thus, the device will retail for around 1800 US dollars (or 200,000 Yen, to be more precise), a price point that probably won't deter the early adopters, although they might have some pretty serious problems finding a store that actually has at least one of these things on stock.

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