This year the first commercial organic LED TV hit the US market, some 20 years after the invention of a fluorescent diode by Eastman Kodak Co’s Ching Tang. Yet while the 3-mm-thin, 28-cm-diagonal TV from Sony Corp approaches the OLED promise of low-power, flexible products, other TV manufacturers have been slow to follow. Priced at $2500, Sony’s OLED TV—which, unlike LCDs, requires no backlight or filters—costs five to six times as much as a similarly sized LCD TV.
Most commercial OLED displays found in cell phones, other small consumer products, and Sony’s new TV are made by vacuum evaporation of small organic molecules. That process, however, is tricky to scale up. A competing process uses more scalable inkjet printing to make polymer OLEDs, but they lag behind the efficiencies of small-molecule diodes. To get both advantages and compete with the cost of LCDs and large-screen plasma TVs, some OLED manufacturers...
