Sony & Panasonic End OLED TV Tie-Up to Focus on 4K LED LCDs

This is probably not the best Christmas gift for video enthusiasts: Panasonic and Sony have decided to end their alliance to co-develop large-screen OLED TV technology for mass production, just a short 18 months after the initial tie-up. Both Japanese firms will focus their respective efforts on 4K Ultra HD LED LCD televisions instead.

Panasonic OLED TV

Sony and Panasonic embarked on their OLED television joint venture in the summer of 2012, seeking to take advantage of the former’s OLED knowledge and the latter’s printing method to help them compete better with South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung and LG. However, both companies have decided to not renew the partnership when it expires this month, which is a big blow to those hoping that consumer-grade OLED TVs will be forthcoming from either TV brand in the near future.

While Panasonic and Sony have both showed off their 56-inch 4K OLED TV prototypes at CES 2013, it appears that they cannot produce the panels at a low enough cost, or make them last long enough. Given the uncertain outlook for OLED televisions in the short-to-medium term, it’s hardly surprising for the Japanese conglomerates to call off their partnership.

This leaves Samsung and LG as the remaining players in the large-sized OLED display market at the moment with their respective 55-inch curved OLED models, namely the Samsung KE55S9C and the LG 55EA980W. For videophiles who are praying for a glimmer of hope this festive season that OLED TV technology can become mainstream, LG Display has started supplying its WRGB OLED panel to other manufacturers, and there’s also the emergence of inkjet printing which can potentially improve yields and extend panel lifespan to facilitate the mass production of (cheaper) OLED TVs.

Source: Nikkei

3 comments

  1. It sucks. The market welcomes 4K sets with older technology, and OLED is still far away.
    What the hell are video enthusiasts supposed to do? I’m sure many won’t cope with LCD.

  2. Pursuing 4k with sub par LCD tech is daft.

    I had my first plasma for 12 years. I was planning on keeping the current one, bought in ’12, for 5-6 years. Looks like I’ll be holding onto it for longer…

  3. This just shows where the big company focus is: Selling to the masses based on marketing hype rather than real performance. It’s like the digital camera market hyping up megapixels beyond lens quality. There is no significant 4K content and that will remain so for several years to come. Even if there was, I find many people still haven’t bought into blu-ray 1080p benefits. Indeed there’s ever increasing interest in streaming re-encoded, over-compressed content from a NAS box.

    Still, I must confess my initial reaction to this news was not too negative. Panasonic only recently got the hang of making a TV that didn’t fiddle about with the picture (undefeatable sharpening, frame-rate interpolation, etc.) and Sony have long since lost their prestige position in the consumer electronics market. Whilst I wasn’t that impressed by the review on this site of the LG OLED effort, the Samsung one definitely has promise.

    Since the ultimate aim of OLED isn’t just to satisfy us enthusiasts, but is intended to eventually prove cheaper to produce than LCD, the companies who don’t buy into it may find themselves in a tricky spot if the others do succeed.