ADVANTAGES
The different manufacturing process of OLEDs lends itself to several advantages over flat panel displays made with LCD technology.
1. Lower cost in the future
OLEDs can be printed onto any suitable substrate by an inkjet printer or even by screen printing, theoretically making them cheaper to produce than LCD or plasma displays. However, fabrication of the OLED substrate is more costly than that of a TFT LCD, until mass production methods lower cost through scalability. Roll-roll vapour-deposition methods for organic devices do allow mass production of thousands of devices per minute for minimal cost, although this technique also induces problems in that multi-layer devices can be challenging to make due to registration issues, lining up the different printed layers to the required degree of accuracy.
2. Light weight & flexible plastic substrates
OLED displays can be fabricated on flexible plastic substrates leading to the possibility of flexible organic light-emitting diodes being fabricated or other new applications such as roll-up displays embedded in fabrics or clothing. As the substrate used can be flexible such as PET, the displays may be produced inexpensively.
3. Wider viewing angles & improved brightness
OLEDs can enable a greater artificial contrast ratio (both dynamic range and static, measured in purely dark conditions) and viewing angle compared to LCDs because OLED pixels directly emit light. OLED pixel colours appear correct and unshifted, even as the viewing angle approaches 90° from normal.
4. Better power efficiency
LCDs filter the light emitted from a backlight, allowing a small fraction of light through so they cannot show true black, while an inactive OLED element does not produce light or consume power.
5. Response time
OLEDs can also have a faster response time than standard LCD screens. Whereas LCD displays are capable of between 2 and 16 ms response time offering a refresh rate of 60 to 480 Hz, an OLED can theoretically have less than 0.01 ms response time, enabling up to 100,000 Hz refresh rate.
DISADVANTAGES
1. Current costs
OLED manufacture currently requires process steps that make it extremely expensive. Specifically, it requires the use of Low-Temperature Polysilicon backplanes; LTPS backplanes in turn require laser annealing from an amorphous silicon start, so this part of the manufacturing process for AMOLEDs starts with the process costs of standard LCD, and then adds an expensive, time-consuming process that cannot currently be used on large-area glass substrates.
2. Lifespan
The biggest technical problem for OLEDs was the limited lifetime of the organic materials. In particular, blue OLEDs historically have had a lifetime of around 14,000 hours to half original brightness (five years at 8 hours a day) when used for flat-panel displays. This is lower than the typical lifetime of LCD, LED or PDP technology—each currently rated for about 25,000–40,000 hours to half brightness, depending on manufacturer and model. However, some manufacturers' displays aim to increase the lifespan of OLED displays, pushing their expected life past that of LCD displays by improving light outcoupling, thus achieving the same brightness at a lower drive current. In 2007, experimental OLEDs were created which can sustain 400 cd/m2 of luminance for over 198,000 hours for green OLEDs and 62,000 hours for blue OLEDs.
3. Color balance issues
Additionally, as the OLED material used to produce blue light degrades significantly more rapidly than the materials that produce other colors, blue light output will decrease relative to the other colors of light. This variation in the differential color output will change the color balance of the display and is much more noticeable than a decrease in overall luminance. This can be partially avoided by adjusting colour balance but this may require advanced control circuits and interaction with the user, which is unacceptable for some users. In order to delay the problem, manufacturers bias the colour balance towards blue so that the display initially has an artificially blue tint, leading to complaints of artificial-looking, over-saturated colors. More commonly, though, manufacturers optimize the size of the R, G and B subpixels to reduce the current density through the subpixel in order to equalize lifetime at full luminance. For example, a blue subpixel may be 100% larger than the green subpixel. The red subpixel may be 10% smaller than the green.
4. Efficiency of blue OLEDs
Improvements to the efficiency and lifetime of blue OLEDs is vital to the success of OLEDs as replacements for LCD technology. Considerable research has been invested in developing blue OLEDs with high external quantum efficiency as well as a deeper blue color. External quantum efficiency values of 20% and 19% have been reported for red (625 nm) and green (530 nm) diodes, respectively. However, blue diodes (430 nm) have only been able to achieve maximum external quantum efficiencies in the range of 4% to 6%.
5. Water damage
Water can damage the organic materials of the displays. Therefore, improved sealing processes are important for practical manufacturing. Water damage may especially limit the longevity of more flexible displays.
6. Outdoor performance
As an emissive display technology, OLEDs rely completely upon converting electricity to light, unlike most LCDs which are to some extent reflective; e-ink leads the way in efficiency with ~ 33% ambient light reflectivity, enabling the display to be used without any internal light source. The metallic cathode in an OLED acts as a mirror, with reflectance approaching 80%, leading to poor readability in bright ambient light such as outdoors. However, with the proper application of a circular polarizer and anti-reflective coatings, the diffuse reflectance can be reduced to less than 0.1%. With 10,000 fc incident illumination (typical test condition for simulating outdoor illumination), that yields an approximate photopic contrast of 5:1.
7. Power consumption
While an OLED will consume around 40% of the power of an LCD displaying an image which is primarily black, for the majority of images it will consume 60–80% of the power of an LCD: however it can use over three times as much power to display an image with a white background such as a document or website. This can lead to reduced real-world battery life in mobile devices when white backgrounds are used.
Source : Wikipedia
