You have to wonder why we haven’t seen any commercial OLED HDTVs aside from the Sony OLED which isn’t even 20 inches big. It turns out that what’s holding them back is that given the expense of this new technology the screens don’t last very long.
How long do OLED screens last? As much as 35,000 hours. Compare that to the 100,000 hour rating plasma HDTVs have. This means that if you watch television 6 hours a day you’d get over 10 years from these televisions in a perfect world. Unfortunately this isn’t a perfect world and even with plasma televisions they start losing their brightness way before they get to 100,000 hours.
Last year DisplaySearch took a look at the Sony XEL-1 and came to the following conclusion:
The RGB architecture is very sensitive to the image and has a 5,000 hour lifetime for white and a 17,000 hour lifetime for the typical video image, well below the published specifications of Sony,” the report concludes. “Moreover the panel suffers from differential aging: After 1,000 hours the blue luminance degraded by 12 percent, the red by 7 percent and the green by 8 percent.
While it’s possible Samsung may have found a way to improve in places Sony wasn’t – is it worth taking the risk?
Samsung needs to come out and say that OLED is ready for primetime, otherwise people will end up sending big money for shotty technology.
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