With global consumer preferences shifting away from conventional laptops with 15-inch displays, first-half panel shipments in the 15-inch class dropped 14 percent year over year, to 38.4 million units from 44.5 million, IHS said Thursday in a report. However, with the growing popularity of Chromebook, notebook display panel shipments in the 11-inch class grew to 11 million units first half from 8 million a year earlier, IHS said. “Thanks to affordable prices, and a completed ecosystem with a host of hardware and app choices and a user-friendly cloud environment, Chromebook has expanded its customer base from small- and medium-sized businesses and the education market to general users,” IHS said. With notebook panel prices remaining low, profitability has become an issue, and many panel makers are facing pressure to maintain fab loading and gain market share, it said. “Panel cost structure has become crucial in the struggle to stay competitive,” it said. “Continuous panel oversupply not only hurts profitability, but could also confuse the real panel market demand in the fourth quarter of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016. It’s time for panel makers to revise their production numbers, and curb capacity utilization, to keep pace with actual market demand.”

The global CE marketplace “is moving more and more in OLED’s direction, with new OLED products and new OEMs adopting OLED technology,” Universal Display CEO Steve Abramson said on a Thursday earnings call. That in turn is “driving new investments in capacity” at OLED production plants, said Abramson, whose company is one of the world’s largest licensors of OLED technology. It bodes well for the OLED market that LG Display recently repeated its plans to ship 600,000 OLED TV panels in 2015, he said. LG is achieving better than 80 percent production yields in its 1080p OLED TV panels and 65 percent yields in its Ultra HD OLED TV panels, he said. LG Display has committed to spending more than $900 million on OLED TV panel production this year, he said. Many panel manufacturers recently showcased “improved-concept OLED displays that illustrate” the technology’s key “benefits,” including better color, image contrast, power efficiency, transparency “and manufacturability over plasma,” he said. For example, LG Display in May showcased a 55-inch OLED TV panel that’s only 0.97 mm thick that “can easily be stuck to a wall with a magnetic back,” he said. OLEDs are “ushering in a whole new world of design possibilities and applications,” he said.

Apple is driving smartphone makers’ push to high-resolution displays, said an IHS report. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus led growth in the low-temperature polysilicon thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display (LTPS TFT LCD) category for smartphones, which grew by 31 percent to 251 million units in first half 2015 over the first six months of 2014, IHS said. IPhone displays were 52 percent of all LTPS TFT LCD smartphone display shipments for the period, it said. Display manufacturers are now investing in new fabs to increase future production capacity, not only for LTPS TFT LCD displays but also for high-resolution active-matrix organic light emitting diode (AMOLED) displays, said IHS. “Apple adopted wider displays with higher resolution in its latest iPhone series, which has helped spur demand in LTPS TFT LCD displays,” said Hiroshi Hayase, analyst. Following Apple were Xiaomi, LG and Huawei with 6, 5 and 5 percent share each, it said.

Extending the attributes of flexible AMOLED-based display technology -- used in the Galaxy S6 Edge and Apple Watch -- to lower-cost LCD screens is possible but with challenges, said DisplaySearch analyst Charles Annis in a blog post. Plastic thin-film transistor (TFT) LCDs offer many of the advantages of flexible AMOLEDs in being unbreakable, thin, light and conformable, Annis said, but illumination is an obstacle for LCDs that require either a backlight or front light for illumination compared with self-emitting AMOLED displays. AMOLED is also superior in motion response, color reproduction and contrast ratio, he said. LCDs have the potential for color shifting from nonalignment of the TFT and corresponding color filter subpixel, viewing angle dependence and light leakage after curving or flexing, said Annis. Merck affiliate EMD and FlexEnable are attempting to overcome the obstacles to flexible LCDs and have demonstrated functioning plastic IPS (in-plane switching)-type TFT LCD, he said. EMD and FlexEnable see LCDs as a lower cost and faster road to widescale flexible display adoption than AMOLEDs and maintain that challenges to flexible LCD commercialization can be overcome by incremental improvements that don't require major technology breakthroughs. They propose using organic TFTs (OTFTs) to drive the active matrix because they’re intrinsically flexible and can be fabricated at very low temperatures. That enables the use of low-cost conventional plastic substrates and involves a simple and high-yielding bond/de-bond process, he said. EMD is also developing a new type of cell architecture/spacer technology to overcome cell gap variation problems in flexible LCDs, said Annis. The technology polymerizes walls between the front and back planes to maintain the gap and contain liquid crystal (LC) material within a defined area, he said. The backlight remains a sticking point for flexible displays. They can be curved, but making them flexible is more difficult, said Annis. “Reflective LCDs and front-lights are a potential way to side-step this concern, but color reproduction and contrast are typically compromised in reflective displays,” he said. Plastic TFT LCDs made on low-cost flexible substrates for curved applications may be feasible -- and could theoretically be produced more cost effectively than AMOLEDs -- but there’s “a long road to travel” before flexible LCDs can move from prototyping to commercial production, said Annis.

Chinese LCD panel maker Tianma successfully incorporated Lotus NXT glass into its 5.46- and 4.97-inch full HD panels for smartphones, Corning said in a Thursday announcement. The panels have resolutions "upward" of 500 pixels per inch, Corning said. The company introduced Lotus NXT glass at last week’s Display Week conference in San Jose, positioning it as an example of new technologies that will protect LCD’s standing as the “dominant technology in displays for very, very many years” (see 1506010034). Lotus NXT glass promotes lower total pitch variation, so LCD TV panel makers can achieve higher pixel counts, better energy efficiency and higher production yields, Corning has said.

Samsung Display unveiled mirror and transparent OLED display panels at Retail Asia Expo 2015 in Hong Kong Wednesday. The technology, designed for retail use, is integrated with Intel RealSense technology to allow consumers to “self-model” clothes, jewelry or other retail items using a “virtual fitting room,” said Samsung. The Intel technology combines consumer-grade 3D “depth capturing” cameras with an automated library of stored “perceptions.” In RealSense, a front-facing camera captures subtle facial movements, precisely tracks widely varying finger and hand movements and distinguishes between backgrounds and foregrounds, said a news release. A rear-facing camera can accurately scan and measure rooms and objects, and a snapshot camera can alter a photo’s background after a photo has been taken, it said. In the future, the OLED mirror display could replace home mirrors and provide digital information services in addition to reflective glass, said Samsung. It said the advanced OLED display panels could provide new opportunities for visually interactive computing technology.

Crowdsourced with nearly $900,000 in Indiegogo funding, the Touchjet Pond (formerly called Touchpico) portable interactive projector is now ready for sale, its makers said at a “sneak peek” live demonstration May 11 in London the day before its official launch in San Francisco. Touchjet is “the first consumer device that turns any flat surface into a super-sized touch screen,” the company claimed. The device is smaller than a paperback book, weighs only 9.6 ounces, has 20 GB of onboard and SD card storage, and batteries for two hours of beaming video up to 80 inches in size on any flat surface, it said. The projector is effectively a tablet, based on Android 4.4 and running any of 800,000 standard Android apps, it said. It’s controlled by a stylus pen used to touch the screen surface. This behaves like a traditional, capacitive touch screen, so almost any wall, table, ceiling or floor becomes a touch TV responsive screen or educational whiteboard, it said. The heart of the device is a light processing unit (LPU) affixed near the lens of the projector, which picks up infrared light from the stylus that’s reflected from the surface that’s acting as a screen. After one-time calibration to compensate for image distortion, the LPU translates the location of the user's gesture into a standard touch-screen signal. In the London demo, the image we saw was one of fully acceptable brightness, even with the demo held in a well-lighted room. The user has to remember not to come between the stylus and projector lens sensor, as that would block the infrared control. We observed only one brief lack of response to the stylus. U.S. pricing will be $599 when pre-orders begin shipping in three weeks, the company said. The company acknowledged that there have been “negative posts” from Indiegogo backers about delays in shipping. “We understand their frustration,” it said in a statement. But “we ran into a few unforeseen issues with our manufacturing process,” as can happen “with the first production run for any new device,” it said. “We are thrilled to be delivering the first batch of devices to our earliest supporters.”

Kodak’s decision last week to go it alone in developing copper mesh touch-sensor display technology after UniPixel terminated the joint development agreement the two companies shared since 2013 (see 1504280030) will require Kodak to “perform a comprehensive review of the market and sales opportunities for this technology,” CEO Jeffrey Clarke said Thursday on an earnings call. The copper mesh touch-sensor technology business “continues in its startup phase, where progress is harder to forecast than in Kodak's more established businesses,” Clarke said. The contract with UniPixel had a 90-day termination “notice period that we're 15 or 20 days into,” he said. The termination's “biggest impact” is that “nearly all the revenues will go to Kodak,” vs. the 50-50 split that would have been in place had the Kodak-UniPixel deal continued, he said. Kodak also “has complete control over the program now, and we'll reap all of the economic upside of the program, short of a modest royalty to UniPixel,” he said. "So it's very good news for Kodak from that perspective.” On the cost side, “we will need to purchase the equipment from UniPixel from the partnership,” Clarke said. Kodak also will need “to invest some additional resources on the go-to-market side,” he said. He gave no estimates of those costs.

The use of in-cell and on-cell touch technologies by smartphone market leaders Apple and Samsung helped drive 47 percent shipment growth in those displays in 2014, IHS said Monday in a report. In-cell and on-cell embedded touch displays are forecast to be 40 percent of touch module shipments in 2015, up from 36 percent last year, it said. Japan Display also uses hybrid in-cell touch displays in some tier-one phones from LG, Xiaomi and Huawei, IHS said. “The technical touch sensor evolution is changing the face of touch-panel competition,” said Calvin Hsieh, IHS director. Since Apple adopted in-cell touch technology in 2012, and Samsung selected on-cell AMOLED for its flagship phones, use of embedded touch technology for smartphones has grown rapidly, and now panel makers’ embedded touch display solutions have entered all smartphone segments, Hsieh said. Apple’s in-cell displays, Japan Display’s in-cell displays and Samsung’s on-cell AMOLED displays primarily focus on the high-end mobile phone market, while on-cell TFT LCD by single-layer patterning fills the gap for entry-level and mid-range markets, IHS said. “Fierce market competition, declining average selling prices and panel oversupply” are contributing to growth for embedded touch displays, which offer advantages in design, thinness and cost, Hsieh said. Customer preference for embedded touch displays can boost average selling prices and revenue, he said. That’s led to nearly all panel makers “aggressively approaching smartphone brands with their own solutions,” he said.

Kodak will go it alone in developing copper mesh touch-sensor technology, following UniPixel’s decision to terminate the joint development agreement the two companies shared since 2013, Kodak said in a Monday news release. UniPixel decided “the risks required to achieve a viable business model” in copper mesh sensor technology “in a reasonable time frame were too great, particularly under an agreement that shared any profits generated,” UniPixel said in an SEC filing. Kodak is “pleased to have full control over the technology development program and excited about the business opportunities ahead,” it said. “We expect to have products based on this technology in the market before the end of this year.” Kodak said it continues to believe "copper mesh technology for large-size touch screens, together with the silver-halide based touch sensors for phones and tablets that Kodak has been developing separately, will give the company a broad offering in the rapidly growing touch screen market.”