“LCDs are growing fast, and basically taking over the market,” he said. About 76 million LCD televisions will be sold worldwide this year, and about 99 million next year, iSupply predicts. By 2011, sales of 165 million LCD sets are forecast. In contrast, he said, only about 13,000 of the new OLED televisions will be sold in 2008.

Consumers can buy a 50-inch LCD television for roughly the same price as the much smaller Sony OLED, he said, largely because of economies of scale.

But OLEDs may gradually become more popular, said Paul Gagnon, an analyst at DisplaySearch, a market research firm in Austin, Tex. “There’s speculation that beyond 2015, OLEDs could advance to become a creditable threat to the LCD flat-panel business,” he said.

OLEDs have some technical advantages. LCDs typically use white light that is filtered into primary colors and remixed. “You lose some of the breadth of the color spectrum that you see in the natural world,” Mr. Semenza said of the process. “But OLEDs, depending on the materials and processes, produce highly saturated individual colors that are then combined to make this broad color spectrum and wide viewing angle.”

OLEDs also have the potential to be produced cheaply.

“The materials emit their own light,” he said, “so you don’t need the back or side lights of LCDs, or theoretically all of the color filters.”

Small OLED panels are already starting to catch on in mobile displays in Asia, said Chris Chinnock, president of Insight Media, a market research firm in Norwalk, Conn. “The OLED displays on mobile phones have the same advantages as the TV  wide viewing angles, great colors and thinness,” he said. “All of those factors are very attractive if you are going to run TV and video on cellphones.”

The semiconductor technology of light-emitting diodes is traditionally based on inorganic materials like silicon. In the new, parallel electronic universe of OLEDs, though, carbon-based organic materials provide the glow. Pioneering work in the technology was done in the 1950s by Martin Pope, now an emeritus chemistry professor at New York University. Sony displayed one of the new televisions at a recent symposium in honor of Professor Pope’s classic work. “I was amazed,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that engineers could do that from my experiments with little jars and bottles.”