The plastic organic layers of OLED are thinner, lighter and more flexible. Someday, we will even be able to roll up our TV’s and put them away or have them built in our clothing. OLED’s can be made into lights so walls and windows could potentially be turned into light fixtures in the future. OLED’s are brighter than LED’s because the organic layers are much thinner than the crystal layers of LED’s. OLED’s do not require back-lighting like LCD’s because they generate light themselves and therefore also consume less power. In the future, OLED’s may be 100% efficient.
There are a few disadvantages. The manufacturing costs are still expensive. While the red and green films have longer lifetimes (46,000 to 230,000 hours), the blue film only has 14,000 hours. Also, water can easily damage the OLED’s.
LG has a prototype that should come out in the first or second quarter of this year in the form of a 55” TV. Samsung has something similar with a 40” TV.
In the future, it is projected that an 80” TV that is only a quarter inch thick could be possible. One of the down sides is that on the market right now are only small screens like phones because it is difficult to make this on a large scale and still have good picture quality. This is precisely why there is so much excitement over the LG and Samsung TVs. Tim Moynihan at PCWorld said that the colors are vivid and the blacks are pitch-black. The response times and motion are fast and sharp.
Here is a really neat figure on how OLED works: