OLED Ownership Will Stay as Small as the Screens

By Danny King

Organic Light Emitting Diode televisions, with their minuscule energy consumption and super-clear pictures, are perceived by some as the wave of the TV-buying future.

While the only OLED currently on the market is Sony’s XEL-1, an 11-inch number priced at a tidy $2,500, panel shipments for OLEDs are estimated to grow faster than any other flat-panel application, almost doubling every year through 2015, NPD Group unit DisplaySearch said this week.

OLED owners still will be limited to the super-adventurous, though, with less than 200,000 global panels projected to be shipped for the TVs that year. By comparison, liquid-crystal display panel shipments will grow about 12% annually to more than 60 million in 2015, DisplaySearch says. Shipments of all flat panels, whose uses include digital picture frames and notebook computers, will grow at about 5% a year.

Still, the Sony OLED, size notwithstanding, may make a vivid impression on the few people who will either own them or have friends with them, according to Pete Putman, president of Roam Consulting and author of the HDTVExpert.com Web site. Mr. Putman said the first buyers will be either broadcast networks or video production houses.

“You’d be hard-pressed to see this image quality on an LCD monitor,” said Mr. Putman in a review on his Web site. “The black levels simply blow LCDs away and are as good as the best Pioneer KURO plasmas.”

The OLED also is a boon for the green set. Mr. Putman tested the XEL-1’s energy consumption at 24 watts, or about a fifth of the power consumed by a typical 32-inch LCD set.