A new report from DisplaySearch today shows that TV-sized OLED panels remain prohibitively expensive to manufacture. According to their data, AMOLED price premiums over LCDs range from 30% for smartphone-sized panels to an order of magnitude greater for a 55” TV-sized display.
AMOLED TVs make great tradeshow demos but the data continues to prove the technology is more vaporware than a viable consumer product in the TV space. With major quality improvements coming for LCDs like 8K resolution, higher dynamic range and wide color gamut, AMOLED faces an uphill battle in the race to become the display technology of the future.
A recent DisplaySearch report reveals that manufacturing issues continue to plague OLED TV production. The analyst firm writes:
Coming into July, mass production of OLED panels is not ready, and 3Q panel production means completed OLED TV set starting timing will be Q4’12 at best.
This information has lead DisplaySearch to revise down its OLED forecast from 50k units to just 20k produced in 2012.
Since the market is determined by supply in the short term, the lack of timely supply means that the potential market of 50K units in 2012 is not possible.
Even this lower projection may prove too bullish. If complete sets do not start rolling off assembly lines until Q4 ’12, OLED makers have very little room for error to move a significant volume of units by the end of the year.
An even bigger problem for OLED technology might be that LCDs are continuing to provide stiff competition. In the same report, DisplaySearch highlights the “dynamic, extremely competitive” nature of LCDs:
The other factor, of course, is that the incumbent technology is dynamic and extremely competitive in terms of value and price. 60” LED-backlit LCD TVs are expected to fall to $999 for Black Friday, while 70” and larger sizes will likely be available at aggressive pricing as well. LCD TVs using oxide TFTs may be available in 4K x 2K format could also have a big impact on 55” OLED TVs when they are launched. Just as in smartphones, where Apple has used high resolution LCD to compete with Samsung’s AMOLED phones, consumers could see contrast ratio and high resolution as offering greater benefit.
CES 2013 should be an especially interesting indicator for the future of TV panel technology, as we will have a clearer picture of what OLED makers can deliver, while LCD makers drive down price and introduce new sets with higher resolution, deeper blacks and wide color gamut.
Since the debut of the iPad in 2010, tablets have become the ultimate content consumption device, but many still to wonder if they’ll ever be capable of replacing notebooks for portable content creation.
While tablets may never truly replace notebooks for all of our content creation needs, especially typing intensive ones, a new crop of apps for iOS and Android are certainly making a case for it.
(via Brian Taylor from CandyKiller: A little doodle made with the glorious new #Paper app)
Recent creative apps like Paper by fiftythree, Adobe’s Photoshop Touch and Apple’s iPhoto for iOS have just started to scratch the surface of the creative capabilities of powerful mobile devices. These apps show us that mobile creativity, when done right, can harness the unique properties of a touchscreen handheld device to offer new capabilities that a laptop cannot duplicate. Drawing with a stylus in Paper, for example, feels remarkably precise and expressive because of a neat gesture trick- the speed of your pen controls the thickness of the line. Similarly, in Photoshop Touch and iPhoto, editing your photos by actually putting your hands on them, while less precise than a keyboard and mouse, can be a revelation for broad stroke tasks like blending two images.
Tablets clearly have the processing power, the battery life and display resolution necessary to become serious creative tools, but there’s one thing missing: color. Creative professionals normally work on displays capable of showing a range of colors that is as much as 60% wider than even the latest “high color saturation” iPad. Artists need to see the content they are creating in the same vibrant colors they see in the real world. Improving the color performance on mobile devices will make tablets truly worthy of a place in any creative professional’s regular workflow.
