Technological progress: OLED is expected to compete with LED in two years

However, the reporter asked some lighting manufacturers whether they agreed with the report’s predictions. Some people believed that OLED’s progress would not be very rapid. Karsten Diekmann, product manager of Osram's OLED team, said: "Market research is a complex project and it's really hard to say what the situation will be like in 5 to 10 years. Our key performance year is 2016, when we expect to break the 100lm/W barrier and be competitive with LED technology. This year at the Frankfurt show we demonstrated a 65lm/W W's OLED, which achieves the same performance as compact fluorescent lamps, but unfortunately no one is interested in the performance of energy-saving lamps. The real benchmark is the performance of LEDs."

OLED is catching up. Diekmann believes that OLED’s technological progress is twice as fast as LED’s. Osram has made great progress since it launched the L50 OLED with 200lm/W and 5000 hours of life in 2010. Today's L70 OLED has reached 65lm/W and 15000 hours of life, and the brightness has also increased by 3 times. Compared with LEDs, it takes six or seven years to see performance double. He also noted that LEDs have greater losses than OLEDs when it comes to thermal performance and optics. Consider the optical loss of the LED and the heat loss of the heat sink. Therefore, at a system level, it is expected that OLED will be able to compete with LED in two years.

Of course, price is another matter. Diekmann predicts that it will be at least 2018, or even 2020, before OLED can become price competitive with LED. And this also depends on adapting to the market in previous years. Diekmann said: "Our goal is clear, OLED must be price competitive to be successful in the lighting market. Achieving good technical performance in the next two years does not mean that we can start selling OLED at the same price as LED. First, we need High-quality projects, new infrastructure, standardization work, and then OLED's economies of scale can begin." Osram hopes that the automotive industry will promote the OLED market and drive down costs to achieve popularization in the general lighting market. "We think OEMs in the automotive industry are desperately looking for opportunities to differentiate themselves and use light to create a brand image," Dickman said. "They will be the first users of OLED technology. With this, we can increase our economies of scale and then bring OLED into the general lighting market."