Samsung Display has announced that it is on track to start mass production of large OLED panels with quantum dots sometime next year. These will be used for Samsung QD-OLED TVs. The company does not currently make OLED TVs.
Samsung Display has now started installing the first batch of the necessary equipment for the production of OLED panels with quantum dots, writes The Korea Herald. This happened at a factory of the company in the South Korean city of Asan, in the western province of Chungcheongnam-do. Previously, Samsung Display has already installed cleanrooms for the production lines of qd-oled panels.
Choi Joo-sun, the head of the department for large display panels, said that the investments in the production of qd-oled panels have been carried out according to plan and that the covid-19 pandemic has not thrown a spanner in the works. The manufacturer is scheduled to have the production line ready by the end of this year and commercial production will begin next year.
Samsung is undergoing a transition in which the production of LCDs is being abandoned, partly because profit margins in this segment are under considerable pressure due to cheap production from China. The company will stop supplying LCDs at the end of this year. Instead, Samsung is now investing heavily in the production of panels with blue OLEDs and quantum dots. Red and green color filters are used to create sub-pixels of those colors. The production of these panels should replace the current LCD production lines.
According to Samsung, Qd-oled TVs can display better colors than existing OLED TVs. These use white OLEDs with a color filter. The maximum brightness would also be better than that of OLED TVs based on LG Display’s OLED panels. In addition, a qd-oled panel from Samsung Display would consist of fewer layers than that of LG Display, which will result in lower costs and probably better yields, DSCC writes. LG owns the patent on the production of OLED panels with white OLEDs, which means that Samsung cannot simply produce its own panels based on this technology.