JZ
SEOUL—Television manufacturers, stung by steep profit declines this year, will start making TV sets that are even thinner and lighter in hopes of sparking new consumer interest and driving average prices higher.
LG Electronics Co., the world's second-largest TV manufacturer, said Friday it will sell a 55-inch TV that is just 3/16 of an inch thick and weighs only 16.5 pounds. Crosstown rival Samsung Electronics Co., the world's largest maker of TVs, is expected to unveil a similarly sized TV at the industry's big trade fair, called the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas in early January.
The companies aren't yet talking about pricing, but are expected to charge a hefty premium for the products. NPD DisplaySearch estimates the new 55-inch TV models will start selling for about $8,000 in the third quarter of 2012, falling below $4,000 by the end of 2013 as sales volumes increase and companies find ways to manufacture the sets less expensively.
The new products are a milestone for a display technology that has long been discussed as a potential advance over the two long-dominant approaches for building flat-panel TVs. They come as makers of TVs, and manufacturers of display panels used in them, badly need new features to boost consumer excitement amid severe price declines that are squeezing profits.
NPD DisplaySearch on Tuesday said the average U.S. prices for a 47-inch flat-panel TV have fallen below $1,000 for the first time. Meanwhile, consumers don't appear to be flocking in great numbers to adopt 3-D televisions, as some companies hoped; the research firm says 3-D TVs represent only 8% of North American unit sales.
LG Electronics Inc.
LG Electronics will introduce a new 55-inch television,
made with OLED display technology, that will measure just 3/16 of an inch
thick.
Both of the Korean companies' new TVs use a technology known by the acronym OLED, for organic light emitting diode, that up to now has only been available in much smaller sizes. The vast majority of TVs use liquid crystal displays, or LCDs, though a sizable minority use plasma technology.
OLED is already used for screens in cellphones and car radios. Samsung, the largest maker of OLED screens for cellphones, also put them into a 7.7-inch tablet computer this past year.
The key advantage for OLED is that the panel itself emits light, eliminating the need for a light source behind it and keeping the overall structure very thin and light. In some cases, OLED creates better color contrast and uses less power.
Sony Corp. in 2008 began selling an 11-inch OLED-based TV in Japan. Priced at $2,200, it sold poorly and the company ended the product in 2010. Other companies, including Samsung and LG, have demonstrated larger-sized OLED-TVs in labs and technical conferences. But until now, no company could cost-effectively produce large OLED screens because of constraints in factory processes.
In announcing its 55-inch OLED-TV, LG didn't say what it would cost. The Seoul-based company said it expects to begin production in mid-2012 and reach full production in 2013.
LG's component affiliate, LG Display Co., recently said it would offer 55-inch OLED panels to LG and other makers in 2012. It also revealed a manufacturing breakthrough that allowed the larger-sized OLED panel.
Small-size OLED screens are created by placing organic material that emits three colors—red, green and blue—on a substrate. When combined, the three colors can form any color. But it's hard to do that on a large screen because larger masks tend to sag in the middle and the materials then overlap on the substrate, making a mess of the pixels.
Material for each color is deposited on the substrate through a fine metal mask, with one mask used for each color so that colors line up in a precise, very close pattern that, to the human eye, appears to create one pixel, or point of light.
LG Display's solution was to stack the three color materials vertically, with the red, green and blue combining into a white pixel. The color is then separated using a filter on the screen, similar to how LCDs show color.
"The patterning issue is a very big problem," Choi Sang-hun, an LG Display engineer, said in an interview. "But we refined a new patterning method with white OLED."
The idea was developed at Eastman Kodak Co. but LG bought that firm's OLED-related patents in 2009. The trade-off is the organic materials have to shine brighter, meaning an OLED-TV made this way will require more power than one made with the factory process used for smaller screens.
Samsung has been working on a factory process that uses the traditional dispersal of the three color materials, though with some refinements. It will initially use that on its OLED-TVs, saidJun Eun-sun, a spokeswoman at Samsung Mobile Display Co., the Samsung affiliate responsible for such components. "But we are not ruling other alternative technologies out," Ms. Jun said.
The development is akin to the emergence of a factory process in the 1990s that allowed the use of LCDs to expand from laptop computers to hang-on-the-wall TVs. The step cut the time required to disperse liquid crystal across a 30-inch screen from five days to five minutes.
Manufacturers have been hoping for a similar breakthrough for OLED screens, which may ultimately prove less costly to make and sell because they don't require lighting, analysts said.
Even with the technical leap, TV makers face another challenge: getting OLED-TVs to a price level that will be competitive with LCD and plasma TVs that are now priced like commodities.
"It's hard to imagine OLED will command too much of a premium in the long run," said Paul Semenza, senior vice president at NPD DisplaySearch "They can argue OLED looks so much better, but it's a risky thing to do because LCD keeps improving thanks to those same companies."
In addition to the OLED TV, LG at the CES trade show is planning to discuss an 84-inch LCD TV based on what it calls Ultra Definition TV, which it has four times the resolution of existing high-definition displays.
No comments:
Post a Comment