One-page technical abstracts are due July 3 for the annual Symposium on Vehicle Displays and Interfaces, said the Society for Information Display Wednesday. SID originally planned to hold the conference physically Sept. 29-30 in Livonia, Michigan, but COVID-19 forced it to convert it to a virtual event Oct.14-15. Organizers are seeking technical papers on a such subjects as trends in automotive displays and consumer acceptance of different display and interface technologies. Authors whose abstracts are chosen will be notified later in July, and their full papers will be due Aug. 17, said SID.
Global OLED panel revenue will increase 14% in 2020 to $31.8 billion, and will grow to $51.2 billion by 2025, reported Display Supply Chain Consultants Monday. It expects smartphones to “continue to dominate the revenue picture” for OLED panels, but its share will “slowly erode as other applications pick up,” it said. Smartphones were 81% of OLED panel revenue in 2019, “but we expect that share to decline to 67% in 2025,” it said. TV panel revenue will increase steadily, “as we expect innovation to push OLED TV to continued success in the premium TV space,” said DSCC.
OLED deployments are “accelerating across the consumer electronics market, including smartphones, with the top three OEMs all using OLED for their premium lines,” Universal Display CEO Steve Abramson told his company’s virtual annual shareholders meeting Thursday. There were about 50 OLED TV makers in the world using LG Display panels for their sets in 2019, he said. “This year, an additional four new OEMs, Huawei, Xiaomi, Vizio and Sharp, will launch OLED TV models, further broadening the landscape of OLED TV players and products.”
Nanosys applied June 9 to register “XQDEF” as a U.S. trademark for an international class of “chemicals, films and plastics,” Patent and Trademark Office records show. Nanosys landed the “QDEF” trademark July 1, 2014, and has been marketing quantum dot enhancement films for years under that trade name. It risks having PTO cancel QDEF if it doesn’t file the required declaration of use statement on the trademark’s sixth anniversary or ask for a six-month deadline extension. Nanosys has "nothing to announce just yet in terms of product details" but plans to use XQDEF "alongside" QDEF, emailed Director-Marketing Jeff Yurek Monday.
South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy chose LG Display to lead its project to develop stretchable displays, said LG Thursday. The company hopes to develop stretchable display products with a 20% elongation rate by 2024, it said. Stretchable displays will play a huge role in the era of IoT, 5G and self-driving cars, said Soo-Young Yoon, head of LG Display Lab. Stretchable displays can shift in “free form,” similar to the way a rubber band stretches, while not affecting the quality of displays, said Yoon. Existing commercial flexible display technologies -- bendable, foldable, and rollable -- are suited to particular areas, said LG, but stretchable displays have a variety of applications including “multi-foldable" smart devices, wearables, and auto and aviation displays that overcome design constraints caused by curved surfaces, said the company. LG Display will oversee 21 entities, including related companies, research institutes and universities; it will also develop core technologies, obtain patents and create markets for stretchable displays, it said.
LG bowed a $399 1.1-pound portable projector with 1280 x 768 resolution. Maximum picture size is 100 inches at 10.8 feet from a wall or screen, said the company Wednesday. Brightness is given as 250 ANSI lumens. Speakers are built in, and there’s Bluetooth audio out for wireless connection to an external speaker. The built-in battery lasts up to two hours. The CineBeam model PH30N measures 5 x 5 x 1.5 inches and weighs 1.1 pounds. Lamp life of the LED light source is 30,000 hours, said the company.
TV display panel makers are expecting a “robust” Q3 rebound as TV makers prepare to boost their orders by 20%, reported Omdia Tuesday. Panel orders from TV makers are forecast to rise to 45.8 million units in Q3 from 38.3 million in Q2. Order growth in Q2 was “uncharacteristically flat,” with shipments rising only 2%, it said. TV makers at the height of the global pandemic in March and April “were forced to curb their ambitions of boosting their display panel purchasing volumes,” said Omdia. The leading Korean TV brands resumed panel buying in late April, it said: “These companies and their Chinese competitors are signaling very aggressive purchasing plans for the third quarter.”
LG is selling a 27-inch QHD Ergo IPS monitor exclusively on its e-commerce site through the end of June, it said Wednesday. The $449 model 27QN880-B monitor will be available through LG-authorized retailers beginning July 1, it said. The introduction comes as some retailers remain closed due to COVID-19 pandemic and others have been hit during looting that occurred amid turmoil following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis May 25. Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said Wednesday (see 2006030030) some stores remain closed. LG representatives didn’t respond to questions on whether the e-commerce policy would apply to forthcoming CE products. The 2560x1440 monitor comes with a flexible ergonomic stand that swivels and tilts; it has a USB-C port and HDR10 support.
Coherent is “encouraged” with the “multiple” laptop manufacturers that are beginning to offer OLED displays as options for their high-end models, said CEO Andy Mattes on a fiscal Q2 call Wednesday. The company supplies laser-based microelectronics to panel makers. The trend toward OLED-embedded laptops “is likely to continue, especially as the yields of our Chinese customers improve and they have the ability to move pricing more in line with LCD over time,” he said. Coherent also remains optimistic about “the pending upgrade cycle” to 5G smartphones, he said. “The linkage between thin-flexible OLED screens and 5G capability seems high, driven by the need for larger batteries to occupy more of the device volume as a requirement for powering the shorter-range, higher-frequency antennas.” Coherent plans to “double down” on the OLED display business, he said. It will also use its “pole position” in laser microelectronics to “enable advancement of technologies” like microLED displays, he said: “These are still in the future, but will be based on many laser processor steps.”
Nanosys will let “lapse” its application to trademark the name TrueQ because “this is one we did not end up deploying,” emailed Director-Marketing Jeff Yurek. It sought the trademark three years ago to give TV maker licensees the option of adopting QLED quantum-dot displays in their sets without being associated with Samsung’s branding of that technology (see 1705300060). Nanosys got four deadline extensions on the application and would have been entitled to a fifth and final one if it had requested it by late February. Samsung owns two QLED-related trademarks -- 8K QLED granted July 2 and Samsung QLED approved March 3. It has at least four more applications for QLED pending at the Patent and Trademark Office. Rival LG actually owns the trademark to QLED as a stand-alone term. Granted in March 2018, it’s for a class of content delivery software used in mobile phones.