In our recent look at the state of OLED televisions, we focused on the present—but what about the future?

With OLED (short for “organic light-emitting diodes”), there’s good reason to believe we’ll see far more of the tech in years to come, given its extreme contrast ratios and super-thin screens. To understand just where OLED might be going—and why companies are embracing the tech in different ways—it first helps to understand where OLED came from and how a $100 million deal with Kodak paved the way for our current reality.

Cooking in Kodak's labs

In the late 1980s, Eastman Kodak took a surprising lead on display technology. This was well before personal computing displays of all sizes dominated the market—and at a time when Kodak wasn’t producing a significant number of display panels itself. The company’s work on what it called organic light-emitting diodes received its first major unveil in 1987, and it differed greatly from the other flat-screen display technology of the time, liquid-crystal displays (LCD).

OLED panels place organic materials between electrodes and then activate them electrically via a control circuit to produce light. (One of the electrodes must be transparent for light to shine through to a viewer.) The subpixels in OLED’s earliest screens separately emitted red, blue, and green light, and this color and luminance information was combined to display anything from white to black and all colors in between.

Unlike LCD, this combination of materials doesn’t require backlighting, which means that panels can be, among other things, far thinner and more energy-efficient. However, OLED originally proved more expensive to manufacture than anything from the competition. When the race to thin, beautiful displays kicked into high gear in the consumer market, LCD and LED panels took the lead.

Eastman Kodak continued developing its OLED portfolio with an important upgrade: white-emitting OLED architecture (WOLED). This innovation, which Kodak patented in 2004, addressed a major issue with blue subpixels in OLED panels degrading at a faster rate than red or green ones. Kodak built these newer panels so that every red, blue, and green subpixel worked in tandem with a white subpixel, one in which the natural degradation didn’t include changes to color or brightness information. Kodak advertised this innovation as a way to make screens last longer and to make panel production cheaper and more efficient.

Yet with this technology in its hands, Kodak rested on its screen-manufacturing laurels, leaving its OLED R&D portfolio mostly untapped in the consumer space (with the exception of digital camera screens and overpriced digital photo frames). By the end of the 2000s, the company found itself struggling with the market’s transition to digital photography. That’s a much longer story than I have time to unfurl here, but it’s generally agreed that Kodak was scrambling to stay afloat.

One way it did so was by selling its lucrative OLED IP portfolio to LG in 2009. At the time, the $100 million deal went uncontested by LG’s rivals. There was no bidding war, likely because other companies didn’t see return on that kind of investment, but the move quickly made LG the major player in OLED TV screens.

Costs and matrices

LG isn’t the only OLED player in the world, mind you, but it is currently the only OLED TV manufacturer in the United States, and it also makes the panels sold by Panasonic, the only other OLED TV player in the international market.

LG has said on the record that the white OLED technology purchased from Kodak gave it a giant lead over other companies’ “RGB OLED” TV panels. LG says its panels cost far less to manufacture than the competition’s—the panels’ crystals are easier to line up in a cost-effective manner.

Others may well catch up in the larger-screen OLED space in the near future, of course. When that happens, it stands to reason that competitors, particularly the deluge of Chinese companies entering the TV manufacturing space, will combine aggressive discounts and other innovations to steal attention away from LG.

For now, many manufacturers do produce panels with OLED technology—though you may better know these as AMOLED displays. (You’ll find them in smartphones from Samsung, Huawei, and Google.) Their main difference from larger-panel OLED displays comes from that “AM” prefix, which means “active matrix.” This refers to the process of sending electrical current through the panel for the sake of pixel illumination, which used to be a less-efficient “passive matrix” process. The older way proved too power-hungry and slow for the kind of quick-performance screen refreshes needed in a smartphone. (LG doesn’t advertise the kind of matrix employed in its latest OLED TVs, but based on what we know, it can probably be described as a combination of AMOLED and WOLED.)

In the mobile-screen space, AMOLED and in-plane switching (IPS) LCDs continue to battle for supremacy, with each offering different color, brightness, darkness, thinness, power, and performance advantages.