For two years running, one of the most fawned-over items at the Consumer Electronics Show has been Sony's organic LED (OLED) television. Measuring just 11 inches in size, the TV doesn't make the stadium-sized impact that, say, a 150-inch monstrosity does, but when you get up close it's quite breathtaking to behold. First you notice the intense colors and brightness of the display. Then you notice how thin it is: Just 3mm front to back. It looks like it should wilt like a sheet of paper.
But two years after the pint-sized (and $2,500) XEL-1 television was released, what's happened to OLED television development? In a word: Nothing.
And nothing is what's likely to happen for the foreseeable future. Sony had previously hoped to release a larger OLED TV before the end of the year, but the company is now putting those plans on hold until at least 2010, according to the Wall Street Journal. (Copy here; the original story is not currently online.)
What's the holdup? Money. OLED technology has so far resisted attempts to cut production costs, especially for larger displays. And while OLED is starting to make more inroads on very small screens like those on MP3 players, cell phones, and cameras, no one aside from Sony is using OLED for anything larger than that. The result: Prices just aren't coming down the way everyone had hoped, and consumers aren't biting.
Quality is also a nagging problem. Only six out of ten OLED panels that Sony produces actually work, which means 40 percent of the panels have to be thrown out during the production process. Bigger panels would almost assuredly have even more problems.
And then there's Sony's general financial situation. Sony's TV division lost $1.34 billion last year, comprising more than half of the company's entire loss. Now Sony is retrenching, trying to get its TV department in order. Sony, like everyone, loves OLED, but the cost to develop it seems like it fails to even approach the revenue it's likely to see from selling it. That means, for now at least, it's back to LCD technology.
Meanwhile other competitors are circling: LG, Samsung, and Panasonic all have OLED sets in the works or in prototype stages. None of these are on the market yet, however.
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