Reuters give us very good news in that morning!
Japanese consumer electronics maker Sony Corp said on Tuesday it planned to spend 22 billion yen ($203.5 million) to develop the production technology to make medium to large organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels.
Sony began researching OLED technology in 1994, and has since positioned OLED as a future-generation display technology. In December 2007, Sony launched the world’s first OLED TV, “XEL-1″ in Japan.
In order to advance the shift towards medium- to large-size OLED panels, Sony has decided to invest towards the further development of production technologies starting from the second half of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2009.
The plant at Higashiura, Japan, which was founded in 1997 as the ST Liquid Crystal Display Corporation (ST LCD) in a joint venture with Toyota Industries, was merged with ST Mobile Display Corporation (STMD), an 80/20 joint venture between the two companies founded in 2005, and is still 14 per cent owned by Toyota. SMD will be transferred fully to Sony at the end of the financial year on 31st March 2009.
The glass substrates from which organic panels are cut at SMD are 600mm x 720mm and 550mm x 650mm. For comparison, existing seventh and eighth generation LCD plants use substrates of up to 2200mm x 2500mm. Sony’s OLED plant is equivalent to a 3.5 or 3rd generation LCD plant. Sony plans to implement production technology for larger OLED screens at its SMD plant by March 2010.
At the CES-2008 Sony shows a 27-inch OLED panel prototyp. Now Sony invests a lot of money to introduce larger OLED-Television devices. The next step to fight against LCD/Plasma technology.
The 27-inch model is incredibly 10 millimeters thin panel and offers over 1,000,000 :1 contrast ratio with outstanding brightness, exceptional color reproduction, and a rapid response time.
Glasgow from Sony said in his keynote: “Sony working on flexible versions of this technology — it is still in the lab stages.”
