Samsung Electronics has launched its first OLED TV, taking the ultra-thin technology into a nascent market despite tenacious production challenges that keep costs high while prevailing LCD screens only get better and cheaper.
The world’s biggest TV manufacturer has staked its display future on OLED - organic light emitting diode - technology and its success with smaller screens has bolstered its smartphone market share and earnings. But big screens are likely to take a much slower road to profits.
OLED technology is widely believed to offer the potential for better picture quality than standard liquid crystal display screens, with crisper picture resolution, faster response times and high-contrast images. It also allows for curved televisions, which manufacturers say offer a more immersive experience.
But production constraints are a key problem.
Samsung is producing OLED screens for TVs from a small pilot line and some analysts estimate the yield at just 30 per cent - with seven out of 10 screens from the line faulty, largely due to difficulties in spreading organic light emitting materials evenly across large screens.
Although many industry experts believe OLED will eventually be the next big thing, they do not think it will manage to do to LCDs what LCDs did to bulky cathode ray tube sets: almost completely replace them in the space of a few years.