OLED lighting - OLED light bulb

OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) are materials that emit light when current is passed through them. OLED are used today to make beautiful and efficient displays, but it is also possible to use the technology to create white light.

OLEDs are very power efficient and they can be made very thin. An OLED light bulb is actually a thin film of material that emits bright light. Because OLEDs can be color-tunable, flexible, or even transparent, exciting new OLED lamp designs are possible.

OLED lighting - the green light source

Not only are OLEDs super efficient, but these 'lamps' do not contain any 'bad' metals such as mercury, which is present in efficient CFL lamps. So OLEDs are really the future lighting source, when all things are considered.

Sample design kits

There are three companies that already offer OLED panels: Philips, Osram and Japan's Lumiotec. These companies are offering 'sample design kits' - which are not real commercial products but high-priced sample kits. The idea is to offer these to designers that can get panels to play with, waiting till the companies lower their prices and start making commercial OLED Lighting panels.

Philips' OLED panels are called Lumiblade, and were the first to be released back in 2009. Philips' panels come in different sizes, shapes and colors. Check out our first OLED light review of a couple of panels they sent us. Philips thinks that transparent and color-tunable OLEDs will be here within 3-5 years. Flexible ones? a bit longer, might take 5-8 years.

OSRAM offer just one kind of OLED panel called the ORBEOS (available since November 2009). It's a round panel (88mm diameter) with 25lm/W efficiency. The price is around $375. Here's our hands-on review of the ORBEOS.

OSRAM ORBEOS

Lumiotec started offering their white OLEDs in February 2010. It's a rather large (15cm by 15cm) square panel that's very bright. The kit costs over a $1000. Here's our on-hands review of Lumiotec's OLED panels - which includes a comparison to the Philips and OSRAM panels as well. Here's a short video review of all these panels:

OLED lamps

There are several companies that offer lamps built from OLED panels - obviously at a very high price. Blackbody are offering several lamps (with their own OLED panels). The light-photon (shown below), for example, which has a single large 47cm x 37cm OLED panel costs $5900. Their largest lamp (called Big-Band) uses 249 OLED panels! we do not know the price of this one...

Light Photon OLED lamp

Other companies that offer OLED lamps for sale include Philips, WAC Lighting (using OSRAM made panels), OSRAM and others.

OLED lighting status

As we said already, three companies are already offering sample panels, and some companies are selling high-priced premium lamps. But what about real, commercially available panels?

If OLED Lighting will take off, the market will be huge - billions of dollars. So it's no wonder a lot of companies are researching and developing solutions. The US and the US governments are very active, and fund several projects that involve OLED Lighting technologies.

Besides the companies we already mentioned (Philips, OSRAM and Lumiotec), Konica Minolta are working together with GE towards OLED lighting. They hope to start making them in 2011 (with large-scale production planned for 2014). Mitsubishi are collaborating with Pioneer, and will start mass-producing panels in 2011 (they will sell them under the Verbatim brand). Other companies include Samsung, LG, China's Visionox, Kaneka and others.

Visionox OLED lamp prototype

Here's a nice chart by DisplaySearch, showing the leading companies and their announced OLED lighting plans:

OLED lighting prediction by DisplaySearch

Latest stories about oled for Lighting:

Nanomarkets releases the transcript of their 2nd OLED Lighting teleconference

Nanomarkets hosted an OLED Lighting teleconference on December 14th, focused around the company's upcoming "The Business Case for OLED Lighting" report. Nanomarkets released the transcript, you can request your free copy here. There are some very interesting discussions there. Nanomarkets says that OLEDs are pretty much worse than LEDs or CFL in almost every available metric (efficiency, wattage, cost...) - but can still present a compelling business case because of the special features of OLEDs (flexibility, area lighting, transparency).

This is Nanomarkets' second OLED-Lighting teleconference. The first one took place on September 8th and focused on their OLED Lighting: An Eight-Year Market Forecast 2010 report. The transcripts from that teleconference are available too.

01/12/2011

Novaled shows a new "Jumping Flash" transparent OLED lamp design

Novaled is showing an interesting new transparent OLED lamp design (the "Jumping Flash"). Novaled are using 5 transparent white OLED panels (10x10cm each) and the whole lamp is expandable like a harmonica. When closed, it's a 10x10x bright light square, and when you open it you get a vertical 50x10cm light strip.

Pretty neat design, hopefully we'll get some more photos of this specific lamp soon.

01/11/2011

UDC shows OLED lighting panels at CES

Universal Display (UDC) was showing a couple of OLED lighting panels at CES. These are the same ones the showed at SID this year (and later UDC designed some nice desk lamps using them):

The panels are 6" in size and only 1/8 inch thick.

01/11/2011

Kaneka announce an OLED lighting competition

Kaneka is developing OLED Lighting panels, and have announced a competition - to design a lighting object to be set up in bars. Kaneka will present a bar space (designed by the architect Mr. Koichi Suzuno) based on the 'Attractive bars in Japan' theme in the MilanoSalone 2011 exhibition. This bar venue will be using designs from the competition.

The first prize is one million yen (about $12,000) and an invitation to the exhibition. There are also 3 runner up prizes. You can send your designs by January 10th, more information here.

12/27/2010

Q&A with Kristin Knappstein, business chief at Philip's OLED unit

Philips has transformed the Business Center OLED Lighting into a Global Business Unit OLED. They tell us that this emphasizes the importance of OLEDs within Philips. Kristin Knappstein, Head of Business Creation in the OLED unit has kindly agreed to answer a few questions we had.

Q: Hi Kristin, and thanks for your time. You have launched the first Lumiblade panels back in 2009. How's the response so far?

The first Lumiblade panels were already available in 2008 through our Technology kit, which was very well sought after.

Since then we have had constant request for panels in all shapes and sizes. Today, people not only can order from from our webshop a wide array of standard panels – which are delivered in our Lumiblade Experience Kit – but also our Lumiblade modules and moreover Lumiblades of individual shapes and sizes by contacting us.

Reactions have been very positive and inspiring to us. General statements by our customers are that it is good to have a brand new technology accessible the way we as Philips give access to it. As for a customer driven company it is our strategy to have this feedback in order to align our products with the customer needs.

12/23/2010