Ok news coming out from Samsung is that it’s time to start getting excited, why? Well according to Samsung 2009 and 2010 will be the year that Medium and Large OLED panels will start hitting mainstream and respectable prices. You might recall that Samsung debuted their 14 and 31 inch OLED panels at CES, so I’m taking Medium and Large to mean 14 and 31 inch displays.
The drop in pricing and wide availability will be due to Samsung hitting 3 million OLED panels produced in 2009 and a whopping 6 million panels in 2010. FINALLY MASS PRODUCTION! This all comes as very good news considering a lot of techies have actually probably considered blowing their bank on the $2,500 Sony XEL-1 that’s only 11″. But with mass production and wide availability this means that Samsung should be able to push that price way down, and in turn force Sony to lower its prices and start releasing larger panels.
The race to wide availability of OLED’s at 42″ is on, and in turn the race to replace both Plasma and LED as our TV’s of choice especially remembering those blistering fast refresh rates, and 1,000,000 to 1 contrast ratios that put every other monitor in the world to shame. Only time will really tell what kind of “affordable” Samsung is referring to, are they referring to slightly more than a used cisco router from eBay, or are they referring to the 6-10,000$ that is “affordable” to bill gates and other people that use cash as toilet paper. Considering the production levels their planning, I’m betting somewhere in the middle, definitly more than current LCD pricing which has plummeted of late. So I’d say that 31″ will go for around 2500$, surprisingly the same price the 11″ Sony went for this past year or two. Wow talk about some pissed off Sony customers. I wonder who will be the first to send in a letter to Sony “hey bi*tch where’s my other 20 inches”
Source: DigiTimes
