OLED TVs to take off in 2015 says Display Search, but Sony's staying on the sidelines

Will super-thin OLED screens become the next big thing in TV technology or are they a very thin and expensive red herring? Even the TV industry can’t decide. Sony has been slow to build on its 2007 OLED XEL-1 launch and rival Samsung has been playing down the significance of the technology.

But that hasn’t stopped market analysts at Display Search predicting that the global market for OLED will be worth $5.5 billion by 2015, the year it believes that TV will become a more important market for OLED than mobile devices.

The main proponents of OLED technology look certain to be Panasonic, LG, Toshiba and Samsung.

Panasonic is collaborating with Toshiba to produce an OLED TV, 'within 18 months to two years.' Sony however continues to send out mixed messages, despite being first to market with a TV product. ‘We’re more focused on big-screen technology at the moment,’ Darren Ambridge, Sony's Group Product Manager for TVs told Tech Radar. ‘We really made the XEL-1 just to prove that we could make it.’

While OLED TV isn’t a focus for Sony, it plans to continue developing the technology on mobile products: ‘OLED is certainly still important (to us) and you will see some stunning OLED screens in our upcoming Walkman NWZ-X1000 series of media players.’

According to Jennifer Colegrove, Director of Display Technologies at DisplaySearch, ‘AMOLED displays have become an important differentiating factor for high-end (mobile) electronic products.’

But is there really a commercial imperative to develop OLED as a replacement for LCD and plasma? Only time, and perhaps this year’s IFA trade show, which runs between 4-9 September in Berlin, will tell.