Sony Pulls Plug on OLED TV in Japan

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According to Reuters, Sony has pulled the plug on OLED TVs citing sluggish demand for the super small, super thin TVs.

It is still technologically difficult to make large OLED panels and to produce them cheaply, limiting their potential as a mass-market product. Sony's only model is an 11-inch set sold for 200,000 yen ($2,222) in Japan, considerably smaller and more expensive than other flat TVs.
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Well gee, Sony. $2,222 for a 11" screen and the demand's sluggish. How can it be?!
 
Of course now they will cite this as reason to cut their R&D budget for actually making them cheaper....

I love megacorps that fail to realize THEY need to PAY for research on new products....and not every single step forward in that is an instantly profitable situation. The sad part is...SONY actually has oodles of cash to throw at this problem and very well could make it cheaper in 2 years time...but we learned how much incentive they feel they have in operating as such. Blu-ray is a teetering technology as far as adoption due to the rampant consumer raping that took place, and the absolute failure to market it properly.
 
m0deth said:
Of course now they will cite this as reason to cut their R&D budget for actually making them cheaper....

I love megacorps that fail to realize THEY need to PAY for research on new products....and not every single step forward in that is an instantly profitable situation. The sad part is...SONY actually has oodles of cash to throw at this problem and very well could make it cheaper in 2 years time...but we learned how much incentive they feel they have in operating as such. Blu-ray is a teetering technology as far as adoption due to the rampant consumer raping that took place, and the absolute failure to market it properly.
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OLED displays have been sitting in the R&D lab for a while. It is an expensive process, the article cited $2200 for 11 inch display, a vendor showed me a 3"x 4" display that was ~$400. Too expensive for the size and the volumes wont be there to bring it down. There are many other technologies that are much less expensive and have the same functionality.

And since 3D TV's will be the next rage, it makes sense to kill it. It's a good business decision.
 
That is incredibly overpriced, but to sell anything to Japanese it has to be incredibly cheap. I've worked at a Japanese-owned plant in the U.S. for 13 years and they are big-time cheap skates. The guys that work here have to be making close to 6 figures and I've had lengthy discussions about electronics and computers with several of them and they don't buy anything until it comes down in price, or will buy some cheap crap rather than buying something high quality.

I told one guy, "You guys make most of this crap, but ya'll don't even buy it!". He laughed.
 
A requirement in Japan for TVs to include a new filter apparently gave Sony the reason they needed to pull this product out of the Japanese market. Everywhere else they're still selling the XEL-1. It's somewhat of an obsolete display, though, as it's relatively old tech at this point. New OLED screens are so much better and last a lot longer.

In other news, LG is selling a 15" model in Korea at the moment and will launch it this year in the US and elsewhere. They said they'll release a larger model of their OLED TVs each year. Considering how much LG has invested in OLED, this wouldn't surprise me.
 
Wasn't there a picture on the net that I saw somewhere of a company who had produced a 150" OLED? Or maybe it was regular LED. Is there a difference? It wasn't for sale, of course.
 
Where one company with a bad approach backs out others will stay in...

Eventually something will replace current technology, it's just a matter of time plus an improvement in the economy...
 
It doesn't help ether that a lot of Japanese believe that Sony puts a timer in their products to brick them. And the scary part is that this timer has been found and called a software bug in more than one of Sony's products.
 
Soggy said:
It doesn't help ether that a lot of Japanese believe that Sony puts a timer in their products to brick them. And the scary part is that this timer has been found and called a software bug in more than one of Sony's products.
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I threw away a perfectly good Sony TV (except it wouldn't turn on). - because of that "bug". Found out later what the truth was about it. Furious. I will never buy another Sony product again.
 
Monkey God said:
I threw away a perfectly good Sony TV (except it wouldn't turn on). - because of that "bug". Found out later what the truth was about it. Furious. I will never buy another Sony product again.
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please elaborate. I'm no fan of sony, so 9 times out of 10 I wouldn't buy one of their products anyway, but I've never heard of this before.
 
They've done a pretty good job of hiding it then as if this were true, there certainly would have been a class action lawsuit.
 
Might not be true. Who really knows? Supposedly there was a firmware update to fix it. Firmware update for a specific issue seems legit.
 
Wasn't FED or SED going to be cheaper to produce than olden, and those don't have burnin issues?
 
Galvin said:
Wasn't FED or SED going to be cheaper to produce than olden, and those don't have burnin issues?
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SED/FED will eventually be somewhat more expensive to produce than OLED, as the latter can be printed, doesn't require a vacuum and such. On the other hand SED/FED scales more easily to large displays and is easier to drive. All displays, including LCD, have burn-in issues, the only issue is of how long it takes for it to happen. For phosphor-based displays it takes a lot of effort these days, even plasma displays take a lot of effort to display burn-in.

SED was supposed to have been released in 2006, but some backwards patent issues held up the mass-production until last year. At this moment it's not deemed economically sound to produce SED displays.
 
It's just amazing some of the stupid things Sony does and then when it doesn't work they stand there astonished, and look for consumers to blame. While yes they were an amazingly thin TV, 2,000 + dollars should land you in the 50 + inch category, not under 1 foot. the problem is even if one is flush with money it's hard to justify so much money for so little TV (you see what I did there).
 
What a shocking surprise, I'd never have thought this would happen after all these years :rolleyes:
 
The technology is still compelling offering lower power and better display. It's the cost factor which isn't unlike the early LCD displays. Remember when 14 LCD panels first came out, were so blurry you couldn't read text in a font smaller than 18 points and paid a grand for the privilege?

Sony's not the only game in town and I wouldn't be surprised to see something from Samsung, Vizio or any of the other manufacturers out there. It's going to take some early adopting volume (and cash) to get OLED off the ground and make it more reasonably priced. Right now this economy is resisting that plan so Sony's probably playing it safe.
 
Maybe Sony will soon release a newer model, with a bigger screen. LG is also preparing a 15 incher. Though you can't even dream about reasonable pricing on these. If there actually were some competition and manufacturers making larger oled displays we could see prices and tech evolving much faster. Now it seems like all the manufacturers are going to hold on to lcd's as long as possible.
 
Truckweb said:
Oh WOW, just checked the spec of that big OLED screen and...

Screen resolution: 1088x640 pixels

It's not even a 720p display! :D :rolleyes:
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It's meant to be put up on the sides of buildings and in large halls for advertising, information and such :)
 
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