The main benefit of new Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) screens is the bright, clear images they produce. OLED screens refresh faster, so they're better at displaying video. And the best active-matrix models can display nearly four times as many colors as equivalent-size LCDs can reproduce.
Unlike LCDs, OLEDs emit their own light in the form of electroluminescence. As a result, OLED displays appear brighter and sharper than LCDs, even when viewed at an angle. And as a side benefit of ditching the LCD backlight, OLEDs are battery thrifty.
"Power consumption is a critical element in phones," says Muzib Khan of Samsung. "Phones will be multimedia devices, and when you use OLED, you can come down on the battery size, or keep the battery and get more performance."
But OLEDs won't supplant LCDs anytime soon. They're difficult to make, increasing the cost of any device that uses an OLED screen. The majority of the 264,000 active-matrix color OLED displays that will be manufactured this year will be installed in high-end handheld consumer electronics devices such as cameras and mobile phones.
Mainstream OLEDs
But by 2010, display technology analyst Paul Semenza of ISuppli forecasts, factories will be churning out 289 million active-matrix OLED displays annually. He estimates about 88 percent of those will end up in mobile phones.
And OLED televisions are coming, says Jim Sandufski, Samsung's vice president of marketing for visual displays; but don't start salivating yet. Sandufski says that Samsung, which showed off a prototype 21-inch display in January at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is several years away from mass-producing OLED TVs.
Melissa J. Perenson