LG shows OLED panel with a thickness of 0.97 mm
LG Display has shown a flexible OLED panel with a thickness of 0.97mm during a press presentation that was held in Seoul on Tuesday. With the prototype, the company shows that it continues to invest in OLED. A 99″ panel should be released later this year.
The 1.9 kg panel has a screen diagonal of 55″, reports the Korean news agency Yonhap. The “wallpaper” display, as LG calls the screen, hung from a magnetic mat, which in turn was attached to the wall. The panel is flexible, according to LG it can be easily removed from the mat and hung again.The panel is a lot thinner than LG’s currently thinnest OLED TV, whose OLED panel is 4.3mm thick. It is unknown when the manufacturer will actually bring the thin panel to the market, as LG previously promised to release a rollable TV screen in 2017.
LG Display presented the screen as a preview of its future products. The company wants to show that it will continue to invest in the future of OLED; parent company LG Electronics is currently the largest manufacturer of OLED televisions in the world. OLED is seen as a promising display technology for the television of the future, because of the high contrast. LG has released 55″, 66″ and 77″ televisions based on the technology this year. According to Yeo Sang-Deog, president of LG Display’s OLED division, there are plans to introduce a 99″ panel this year.
In April of this year, rumors came out that LG Display wanted to significantly reduce the production of OLED panels. The demand for full-hd panels would not be forthcoming, while the yields of uhd-oleds were disappointing. The company is said to have lowered its intention to sell 700,000 panels to half a million panels. Yeo now stated a sales target of 600,000 panels for 2015. By 2016, 1.5 million panels should be sold. According to Yeo, the yields of the panels are improving quickly enough to meet those sales targets.
According to Yeo, the demand for OLED panels from other manufacturers is currently so great that LG Display cannot meet the demand. LG Display mainly sells the panels to LG Electronics, but it also supplies OLEDs to other manufacturers. LG Display hopes to be able to meet demand again in the third quarter of this year. The manufacturer wants to continue to focus on large image formats, but also wants to invest in its plastic-oled technology for small and rollable screens. For example, a p-OLED screen is used in LG’s own Watch Urbane.