Samsung will only launch LCD screens in 2020

Samsung’s change of strategy took us all by surprise at the end of last summer: Samsung Display, a subsidiary of the Korean company specializing in screen design and manufacturing, began restructuring its LCD screen factories to start producing QD screens. -OLED. Lee Dong-hoon, CEO of the subsidiary, acknowledged in The Korea Herald that Samsung is working to launch QD-OLED screens in the near future.
Samsung QLED
At that time and without more accurate information, it was difficult to estimate when Samsung’s first QD-OLED TVs will arrive in stores, but now we have a tangible track that invites us to conclude that they could come sooner than we expected. It does not seem an exaggeration to think that in 2021 they will already be in stores. In fact, Samsung Display has acknowledged that at the end of 2020 it will stop manufacturing LCD screens in all its factories in South Korea and China.
A spokesman for the Korean company acknowledged this to Reuters: Samsung will stop manufacturing LCD screens this year to speed up the adoption of new technology in the field of next-generation screens.
The transition described by Samsung reaffirms the bet for QD-OLED. The quantum points would be Samsung’s bet in competition with the OLED TVs we already find in stores.
The QLED TVs produced by the South Korean company in recent years to compete in the mid-range and luxury also used LCD screens, which is why Samsung will bet on QD-OLED in the future.
However, there is a compelling reason for Samsung to rely on quantum dots, but that does not mean it will abandon LCD technology. Samsung Displey will no longer manufacture this type of screen, but Samsung Electronics also has other LCD screen suppliers, including Innolux, HannStar, HKC, New Vision Disolay, TCL and Japan Display.
At this point, it is inevitable to wonder how LCD TVs and QD-OLED models will coexist in Samsung’s portfolio, when the latter will finally arrive in stores. We can only speculate, but most likely QD-OLED TVs will occupy the current place of QLED models in the mid-range and luxury range. LCD TVs will continue to compete in the entry range and mid-range, where prices are a deciding factor.
The working principle of Samsung’s QD-OLED screens will be very similar to OLED screens produced by LG Display and those produced by other major manufacturers, such as Philips or Sony. However, if we focus only on the strategy they use to reproduce colors, the first significant difference between the two technologies appears. The OLED screens manufactured by LG Display are of the W-OLED (White OLED) type, through which the light emitted by each of the self-emitting cells of the panel is white. The problem is that to compose a color image we need to get three primary RGB colors (red, green and blue), so it is necessary to place above the array of organic diodes an RGB color filter that is able to reproduce them.
However, the changes proposed by Samsung to W-OLED technology do not stop here. Unlike LG’s OLED screens, which use white pixels, Samsung’s will use blue pixels, so the nanocrystals will be responsible for the action on the blue light to generate the other two primary colors (red and green). This transformation is possible thanks to a very interesting property of nanocrystals: the structure allows them to change the longitude of the light wave, so they manage to manipulate the blue color to generate, starting from it, red and green light.
With the advent of Samsung’s QD-OLED screens we will be able to see if they will be a serious competition for OLED. What we know for sure is that Samsung’s entry into the OLED TV market is good news for us users. Samsung has dominated the global TV market for 14 years, so the advent of QD-OLED will bring fierce competition to LG Display, which is currently the only manufacturer of large format OLED screens for TVs.