[Tejstar]

I just saw the following article at ars technica. It looks like Toshiba are ditching plans to produce 30" OLED screens as the costs of making them are too high to be commercially successful.

Personally I'm quite surprised by this especially as OLED screens are meant to be the next technological advancement after plasma/LCD screens. If Toshiba are finding it too costly who else will get the returns needed for this to hit mass market?

Toshiba announced this week that it was shelving plans to build large OLED displays because the current and short-term costs of mass production are too high to create a commercially viable product. It's surprising that a company of Toshiba's size would back away from OLED-based television manufacturing. OLED displays, after all, have been touted as the Next Big Thing™ as far back as 2001.

[onkeh]

First SED and now OLED, Toshiba need to get some backbone.

[NicolasB]

Originally Posted by onkeh

First SED and now OLED, Toshiba need to get some backbone.

They had no choice about ditching SED, it was against the law for them to be working on it in the first place.

[onkeh]

Originally Posted by NicolasB

They had no choice about ditching SED, it was against the law for them to be working on it in the first place.

Well I didn't know that! Do you any more reading on the subject?

[NicolasB]

Originally Posted by onkeh

Well I didn't know that! Do you any more reading on the subject?

What happened was that there some patents held by a company called Nano-Proprietary Inc. Canon licensed those patents, and then formed a joint venture with Toshiba to develop technology based on them. Nano-Proprietary successfully argued in court that Canon was guilty of breach of contract because the agreement only allowed Canon themselves access to the Intellectual Property; it didn't allow them to share them with other people.

Canon bought out Toshiba's share of SED, but even that wasn't enough to satisfy the courts.

See, for example, http://www.tech.co.uk/home-entertain...leid=887971564