Challenges
For all its amazing benefits, the technology is not without its serious drawbacks. These are the factors that made the 10 inch XEL-1 from Sony cost $6999 when it launched in Australia back in 2009, and explains why no other OLED TV has hit the local market since then.
For a start, engineers at electronics companies have been trying to find ways of improving those organic compounds that create OLEDs to make them last longer.
One of the biggest hurdles the technology needs to overcome is the challenge that blue OLEDs only take about 14,000 hours before they can only offer half brightness, which equates to less than five years if you watch eight hours of TV each day.
This leads to contortion in the picture quality, with red and green colours crowding out the blue thanks to its weaker half-life. Obviously this isn’t the kind of shelf life you’d expect from a $10,000 device.
Also problematic is that water is like kryptonite to the organic compound. That may not be such a problem for your OLED wall mounted TV, but it makes the process of keeping flexible OLED screens safe significantly harder, and a little less flexible.
The cost is the most obvious other issue. With an asking price around the $10K mark, compared to similar sized LCD and plasma screens for around two grand, OLED is going to be a hard pill to swallow for many consumers. However, it is still early days for the technology, and it’s worth remembering that the first plasma screens cost more than $20,000 as well. Given a few years, OLED will become much more affordable.
Four-colour OLED v Super OLED
To make matters slightly more confusing for potential OLED buyers, Samsung and LG have been showing off slightly different versions of the technology in their trade show units.
LG has developed a special four-colour pixel technology, which adds a fourth white sub-pixel to accompany the red, green and blue already there. It also helps take the load off that blue sub-pixel, by squeezing it together with the red and green ones, and then passing the subsequent white light back through an RGB filter.
Even though this sounds like a convoluted way of doing things, it has the added benefit of being easier to mass produce, meaning quicker release times and lower costs sooner, as well as being scalable to different screen sizes.
Samsung, on the other hand, has been developing what it calls Super OLED. What makes this technology ‘super’ is the fact that it doesn’t require a colour filter, instead letting the RGB sub-pixels create the perfect image every time. While the end result is breathtaking to behold, it is more difficult to manufacture and mass produce.
Neither LG nor Samsung have gone on the record about how their upcoming OLED televisions will perform over time, and whether they have had any luck dealing with the short half-life of the blue sub-pixel. That said, LG has claimed that its four-pixel solution helps increase the screen’s longevity, but refused to give specific numbers.
See the future
Either way, compared to every other television format currently available, OLED walks away with the best picture crown. Even the upcoming 4K displays that offer almost four times the resolution of a Full HD display can’t compare to OLED’s clarity, brightness and contrast.
It’s kind of like comparing a 68cm Trinitron with a 55 inch LED LCD – both TVs were amazing when they launched, but side by side, the older technology just can’t compare.
Actually, CRT and Plasma generate light within the pixel, and don’t have a light source behind the screen as wrongly stated above. Otherwise a great article.
Even CRT has passive pixels which needs to be lightened up by cathode ray…