Samsung to show off lower-profile OLED at CES

Major consumer electronics producer Samsung is expected to show off a prototype 31-inch active matrix OLED, and to begin producing 14-inch displays in 2008.

Samsung's latest prototype active matrix screen will be a 31" 4.3 mm display, slightly larger and lower-profile than Sony's 27" 5 mm prototype that it showed off at last year's CES.

The company said this prototype consumes less than half the electricity of an LCD screen of approximately the same size.

Like Sony, Samsung's production model will be considerably smaller than the convention floor model. The company expects to begin production of a 14" OLED screen in 2008. Unfortunately, OLED displays are still quite expensive to make: Sony's 11" screen carries a price tag of $1,740, while Samsung's 14" screen is expected to cost over $3,000.

Because of this current high cost in production, Toshiba revealed that it was shelving its OLED TV plans until at least 2010, according to yesterday's Wall Street Journal. This while Sony phases out its projection TV line to focus on OLED.

While OLED screens remain too costly to be an effective solution for television viewing, their low power consumption make them ideal for use in portable computing, MP3 players and cellular handsets. A notebook equipped with solid state memory and an OLED display will have much lower power consumption than a backlit LCD, spinning drive model, thereby multiplying the potential battery life.