Summary
(1) Power consumption of LCD in TV going down will be a concern for OLED TV and plasma TV.
(2) This news of low power consumtion is welcome for LEDs for their market growth
(3) The power consumption will continue to go down because LED is till marching towards high efficacy.
Analysis
The power consumption of LCD TV is progressively going down because of LED backlight. The local dimming technique was possible because of LED's response time. LEDs are galloping in efficacy and at R&D level an efficacy of 247 lm/w has been reported by Nichia for low power (20 mA) white LEDs. Cree has reported an impressive efficacy of 161 lm/w for high power (350 mA) white LED. These efficacies are for basic packages. Low power white LEDs are routinely mass manufactured with 150 lm/w and high power LEDs are routinely mass manufactured with an efficacy of 100 lm/w. LED backlight in LCD TV seldom demands LEDs to be operated at 350 mA and hence the efficacies will only go up for LEDs operated at 50 mA or 100 mA. R&D efforts on LED (RGB) is intense and is not saturating. The benefits go to progressively decrease the power consumption of LCD panels employed in TV.
CMO's 31.5" LCD TV panel according to this news consumes only 16W for normal images and consumes 32W for full screen white with its LCD luminance of 450 cd/m2. Comparing this with the current 15" OLED TV, the power consumption of AM-OLED employed in 15" OLED TV is 13 W for normal images and 32.5W for full screen white with a luminance of 220 cd/m2. OLED faces a big challenge to compete with LCD TV in terms of power consumption. In this example the comparison is for twice the diagonal size of LCD. A rough comparison can be made for equal size of 15" diagonal between LCD for Notebook of the same resolution and luminance level of 15" OLED TV. Samsung's 15.5" Notebook panel has a power consumption of 3W for full white screen with a luminance of 220 cd/m2. It can be seen that AM-OLED panel for 15" OLED TV consumes 32.5W with a luminance of 200 cd/m2. OLED TV has a long way to go to approach the power consumption level of LCD TV.
Any new technology will take time to reach the peak performance. Even LED technology had only an efficacy of 1-2 lm/W twenty years ago. It is normal to expect OLED technology starting with this performance. Promoters of OLED can reasonably expect the power level to drop once phosphorescent OLED technology is established for mass manufacturing. There are recent efforts in fluorescent pumped phosphorescent OLED that is very promising and may be a solution to the unsatisfactory performance of phosphorescent blue OLED. It is true that OLED does not employ backlight and hence the power ought to come down. It should also be recognized that LCD by itself does not consume much power. So the battle is against LED and OLED in terms of power consumption. It is also true that OLED need not employ color filters and hence the power consumption will be low. By the same token R&D on LCD is substantial to eliminate color filters in LCD. LCDs also may not have color filters once the field sequential LCD minimizes 'color break-up' or LCD marketing convinces consumers on 'color break-up' being not a major issue. So the race is going to be tough. Although 'but and if condition' exists for OLED power to substantially drop to compete with LCD, it may take time of two to three years. There is certainly a bright future for OLED TV and is certainly it is a big challenge for LCD or even the generation may transition to OLED completely. All these will not happen so quickly and LCD will continue to dominate for at least 5 years.
In all of this, LED chip manufacturers, LED packaging houses and LED backlight manufacturers will be be benefited. Philips, Cree, Osram Optosemiconductors, Toyoda Gosei, Nichia, Seoul semiconductors, Epistar, Formosa Epitaxy, Aixtron, Veeco, Citizen, Toshiba Matsushita Display and other LED backlight manufacturers will face increased demand for LED business.
