February 2022

Notion Systems, a leading solution provider for industrial inkjet systems, announced that it had successfully installed an n.jet display system at Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). The n.jet display system was developed in collaboration with MBraun/Germany and includes a fully integrated inert glove box solution that combines compact design with minimized nitrogen consumption.

ITRI is now using the new n.jet display system to research and develop novel QLED and OLED technologies. ITRI is looking to replace vapor deposition and vacuum coating with inkjet printing which could reduce the number of steps, increase material utilization and increase display quality.

According to reports from Korea, Samsung suffers from very low (around 30%) production yields in its QD-OLED production line. It seems as if Samsung Display decided to wait for the market reaction for its new panels before it will invest in expanded capacity.

As the first range of products (monitors and TVs) will launch only in the spring of 2022, Samsung will likely wait till the second half of 2022 before it decides on the future of its QD-OLED technology. This means that SDC's total QD-OLED capacity will remain as it is today (30,000 monthly Gen-8.5 panels) at least until the end of 2023.

Market research firm Omdia says that the sale of QD-enhanced LCD TVs will decline in 2022 to $17.67 billion, down 3.1% from the revenues in 2021. This is the first time since 2017 when the first such TVs were introduced, that the market will decline.

Shipments of QD-LCDs will actually increase this year, but revenues will decline because more of these TVs will be lower in price. 52% of such TVs will cost less than $1,000 this year, up from only 36.5% of the TVs in 2021.

UK-based OTFT-developer SmartKem and QD pioneer Nanosys announced a joint-development project to work on low-cost printed QD displays, that will combine SmartKem's printed organic TFT with Nanosys' quantum dots emitter platform.

Nanosys now refers to its emissive (electroluminescent) QD technology as nanoLED. Both technology platforms, the OTFT backplane and the NanoLED frontplane are solution-based, which could indeed result in a low-cost production process.