Kodak Introduces Innovative New Materials for OLED Displays

Eastman Kodak Company

Kodak Introduces Innovative New Materials for OLED Displays

Demonstrates Display Panels at Society for Information Display Conference

Seattle, May 25 -- Continuing its pioneering role in the OLED display industry, Eastman Kodak Company is introducing new high-performance materials for the manufacture of OLED displays and demonstrating active matrix organic light emitting diode (AM OLED) display panels in new sizes and formats, expanding the range of potential uses for the technology.

Kodak will demonstrate these advances this week at the 2004 Society for Information Display (SID) conference in Seattle (Kodak booth number 1020).

Kodak has developed a groundbreaking OLED formulation that includes four colors: red, green, blue, and – for the first time – white. As a result, manufacturers will have the flexibility to choose the panel architecture that best suits their device design and production needs.

Kodak’s new materials are ideally suited for both passive matrix and active matrix displays. The material set provides efficient red, green, and blue formulations for full-color active matrix displays designed with a red-green-blue (RGB) array of pixels, as well as white formulations for panels designed to use a white-emitting OLED material with a color filter array.

Manufacturers targeting the discriminating consumer’s preferences for electronics devices with displays that have brilliant color, unsurpassed contrast ratio and a wide viewing angle can take advantage of Kodak’s new OLED materials to deliver these benefits in the near future.

“These new materials offer outstanding performance that draw on decades of Kodak color science expertise and materials research,” said Willy C. Shih, senior vice president, Eastman Kodak Company, and president, Display and Components Group. “Our work in materials development is complemented by advances in panel manufacture. The growing variety of form factors that are possible should inspire electronics manufacturers who want to incorporate even more impressive displays into future products.”

The display modules shown at SID demonstrate Kodak’s practical approach to producing a variety of panel sizes and formats. These prototypes, including the newest 3.5-inch AM OLED panel, take advantage of innovative architectures and materials to create a full-color display that is well-suited for image- and video-centric applications such as personal video players (PVPs). The 3.5-inch display – along with 2.5-inch and 1.9-inch panels – is being shown for the first time in the United States. Kodak, along with its partner SANYO Electric Co., LTD, has demonstrated the widest range of AM OLED displays in the industry – from 1.9-inch screens to a 15-inch flat panel display prototype manufactured at SK Display, the two companies’ joint manufacturing venture.

New Leadership

In response to explosive OLED market growth, Kodak has realigned its OLED Products business into two units: Display Materials and OLED Modules. Dona Flamme, general manager and vice president, Display and Components Group, will lead Display Materials (including OLED materials and optical display films); Andrew Sculley, general manager and vice president, Display and Components Group, will lead OLED Modules. The realignment is expected to help accelerate materials development and to better serve customer demand for display modules. As a result, Kodak will have dedicated teams driving these initiatives to better address our customer needs.

Research firms such as Stanford Resources and DisplaySearch predict the OLED display market could reach from $1.5 to $3 billion by 2007. Consumer electronics devices expected to incorporate OLED technology in the next five years include mobile phones, digital cameras, PDAs and DVD players.

Eastman Kodak Company and infoimaging

Kodak is the leader in helping people take, share, print and view images – for memories, for information, for entertainment. The company is a major participant in infoimaging, a $385 billion industry composed of devices (digital cameras and flat-panel displays), infrastructure (online networks and delivery systems for images) and services & media (software, film and paper enabling people to access, analyze and print images). With sales of $13.3 billion in 2003, the company comprises several businesses: Health, supplying the healthcare industry with traditional and digital image capture and output products and services; Graphic Communications, offering on-demand printing and networking publishing systems; Commercial Imaging, offering image capture, output and storage products and services to businesses and government; Display & Components, which designs and manufactures state-of-the-art organic light-emitting diode displays as well as other specialty materials, and delivers optics and imaging sensors to original equipment manufacturers; and Digital & Film Imaging Systems, providing consumers, professionals and cinematographers with digital and traditional products and services.