LG and Samsung didn’t expand on a report from...

LG and Samsung didn’t expand on a report from NPD DisplaySearch (CED Nov 6 p7) indicating that only 500 OLED TVs would reach the market by year-end. Dan Schinasi, Samsung senior marketing manager, told us the company is “still on track to launch OLED this year,” but said for competitive reasons that’s “the extent of our public comment at this time.” For LG, while it’s been the company’s “goal to introduce our OLED TVs to market as soon as possible, we've always been realistic that this is a very new technology,” a spokesman said by e-mail. The company will launch OLED TV “when we feel the product is ready,” he said. Timing, quantities and markets haven’t been finalized, he said. LG is in the “final stage” of assessing production yields for panels made at sister company LG Display’s South Korea plant, he said, and results of those studies will dictate exact launch date and the number of markets where OLED TV will initially be made available. The spokesman wouldn’t say how many of DisplaySearch’s estimate of 500 OLED TVs in 2012 would be branded LG, and said it’s “premature to say” what criteria dealers need to have to sell the product. Pricing wasn’t available and “it’s difficult to predict customer demand this early in the game,” he said. On LG’s commitment to OLED TV in light of the attention 4K x 2K is being given, the spokesman told us, LG’s OLED “will be clearly superior in terms of color accuracy, contrast levels, viewing angles and form factor. Any new paradigm-shifting technology brings with it new challenges. This is nothing new, we expected as much, and our commitment to OLED hasn’t changed.”