Virginia Barry

Reviewed.com / USA TODAY

With OLED tech%2C TVs may one day be credit card-thin%2C ultra-lightweight%2C bendable%2C and transparent.

Universal Display Corp %28UDC%29 is a New Jersey-based company that plays a vital role in OLED tech.

Even though OLED sales are off to a slow start%2C research %26 development continues at a fast pace.

Just a hop and a skip from Thomas Edison's old Newark stomping grounds, an American small business is helping to invent the future of television.

Based in Ewing, New Jersey, Universal Display Corp (UDC) is home to a maze of gleaming labs filled with shiny machines and white-coated technicians. Inside, they're perfecting a recipe that will make TVs credit card thin, ultra-lightweight, bendable, and even see-through — like something out of a sci-fi movie.

OLED Is the Future

The key to this TV of the future is called OLED, or organic light emitting diodes.

"OLED [is] more than just a feature or enhancement," said Tim Alessi, director of new product development at LG Electronics. "It's truly the new state of the art."

While OLED tech has been in your pocket since the late 1990s — chiefly in mobile phones — its debut in TVs last year triggered a media frenzy. It's easy to see why: OLED TVs produce far better image quality than any televisions that came before, with deeper blacks, more vivid colors, and much higher contrast.

So how does this tech work? Where the more common LCD and LED TVs use liquid crystals and a separate backlight to produce a picture, OLED sets incorporate organic molecules that actually emit their own light when electrical current passes through them.

UDC develops and produces those elusive molecules. The final product — a powder — gets shipped from UDC to name brand manufacturers like Panasonic, Samsung, and LG.

Made in America

"UDC has grown from a small New Jersey company to a global technology player," said Janice Mahon, VP of Technology at UDC. But it's also a case study for the changing nature of America's technology industry.

In 1960, 90 percent of American households owned television sets, and most of them came from domestic brands like RCA, Sylvania, Motorola, and GE. These were American companies building TVs from stem to stern — picture tubes, wooden consoles, and all. But gradually, demand for lower production costs pushed manufacturing abroad, and by 1995, the last American TV maker was history.

Yet the United States remains a powerhouse for research and development. Research roots at Princeton and the University of Southern California helped position UDC in its powerful corner of the TV industry, supplying Korean and Japanese brands with crucial components.

The company's quiet 21st century lab may be a far cry from the industry's booming post-war assembly floors, but it's every bit as productive. With more than 3,000 patents and counting, UDC expects revenue of between $142 and $144 million for 2013 — a 30 percent increase from the previous year.

And since UDC does not sign exclusive licensing deals for its patented OLED materials, there's still plenty of room for growth.

The Future of OLED

Of course, UDC's growth depends entirely on wider adoption of OLED in consumer goods, and the growth of the OLED TV market in particular. Unfortunately, while OLED is universally admired as a technology, it isn't yet readily available, or completely trouble-free in larger displays.

"OLED televisions are painfully expensive," said Motley Fool analyst Steve Symington. "[That's] thanks to a combination of limited manufacturing capacity and low production yields — some estimates pegged total initial yields at less than 30%."

LG's debut OLED TV retailed for $15,000 last year, and larger sets announced this year easily eclipse the cost of a luxury sedan. But those numbers are already falling, much like the price of plasma TVs in the 1990s. Just last month, LG slashed the sticker price on its 2013 OLED sets by more than half.

"This price drop […] is a natural progression for new technology, as manufacturing processes continue to become more efficient," Alessi explained. And the number of OLED options continues to grow. In January, LG announced plans to add new OLED models to its 2014 lineup. "We view OLED as the future of television technology," he added.

Even if OLED sales are off to a slow start, R&D continues apace. According to Symington, both Samsung and LG have already committed more than 50 percent of their 2014 capital expenditure budgets to OLED manufacturing and development.

For small companies like UDC, that's great news. On top of TVs, UDC's molecules are at work in everything from smartphones to OLED lighting, and the number of uses is only expected to multiply.

"Our founder's vision was to produce technology that could grow the industry," said Mahon. And now, UDC's magic powder is doing just that.

For more product reviews and news, visit Reviewed.com, a division of USA TODAY, and follow @ReviewedDotCom on Twitter.