8K OLED TV screen created by inkjet printing demoed by BOE

South Korean OLED monopoly under threat?

by Andy Bassett

A year on from unveiling its inkjet printed 4K OLED TV, BOE has now unveiled a 55-inch 8K OLED debutant using the same manufacturing process.

At its recent annual Innovation Partner Conference (IPC) at the Beijing APEC Center, Chinese display manufacturer BOE has revealed an inkjet printed, 55-inch 8K OLED TV screen, one year on from its first 4K equivalent, reports OLED-info.com.

It’s a move sure to send signals out to LG Display who currently manufactures virtually all of the OLED panels that end up in OLED TVs, regardless of the final TV manufacturer name that adorns the television set in the showroom.

The 55-inch BOE 8K OLED TV prototype on display at the conference delivers a maximum brightness of 400 nits and a colour gamut of 95% DCI-P3, indicating that there’s room for development to achieve greater brightness and a higher wide colour gamut coverage.

However, the technical specifications are not really the headline story here because the OLED panel was created by inkjet printing which is an alternative method to the well established evaporation process.

It is believed that the 8K panel was manufactured at the company’s R&D OLED TV production line in Hefei, China, where the company has been putting inkjet printing of OLED panels to the test since 2018.

OLED panels are largely made using an evaporation process in which the organic materials are deposited onto a glass sheet through a thin metal stencil known as a "shadow mask". The process is quite wasteful on organic compounds since the material disperses all over the mask and cannot be reused. In addition, the mask itself is vulnerable to contamination which leads to compromised yields.

Using the inkjet deposition approach to manufacturing removes the need for a mask since the organic compounds can be applied to the substrate far more accurately with fewer stray particles, resulting in a boost in yield. Better use of materials and higher yields could eventually lead to lower prices for consumers.

BOE told cdrinfo.com last year, "With inkjet printing technology, material utilization has reached 90 percent." The company added, "There are significant benefits in terms of equipment and material costs."

Inkjet deposition is not without its issues though and the soluble OLED materials that are required for inkjet printing are less effective than evaporable ones. Plus the inkjet process has struggled to attain the same high densities of evaporation OLED production. BOE’s unveiling of an 8K OLED panel might indicate that some of these issues are behind them.

With the announcement of an 8K OLED panel, BOE are positioning themselves directly at LG Display as a competitor for the large screen OLED market while its capacity for small and medium sized OLED screens for use in the smartphone and automotive sectors will be a direct rival to Samsung who currently manufactures and supplies the majority of these smaller displays to manufacturers.

LG Display recently opened its newest panel manufacturing plant in Guangzhou China which it plans to use to increase its overall OLED production for TVs to reach a target of 10 million units per year by 2022. The plant opened at the end of August 2019 but has since put its production plans back by a few months to early 2020 as it beds in its manufacturing processes.

Source: www.oled-info.com
Image Source: BOE-tech.co.uk
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