"Price remains to be the biggest stumbling block that’s preventing the widespread adoption of OLED displays.”

for the first time, OLED displays being used in notebooks and computer monitors. Lenovo is offering optional OLED displays on their new ThinkPad X1 Yoga device. We saw the OLED variant alongside the standard IPS LCD model and the difference was astounding. The OLED model looked incredibly vivid and images were more lifelike.

Apart from Lenovo, Dell also announced its new 4K OLED UltraSharp 30 monitor at CES 2016. This new monitor boasts very impressive specifications including a 0.1ms response time and a 400,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio. It also covers 100% of the Adobe RGB color space, as well as 97.8% of DCI-P3 color space - the color space used extensively in cinema today. Although it’s a monitor targeted at professional users, the insane response time and amazing colors would likely appeal to any enthusiast or power user as well. But there’s still one problem to overcome However, there’s still one stumbling block and that’s price - the Dell 4K OLED UltraSharp 30 monitor is expected to cost around US$4,999 ($7,137 at the time of writing). Dell’s existing UltraSharp 32 Ultra HD 4K monitor, which uses an IPS LCD display and was also designed for professional use, is considerably more accessible at US$1,799 - just over a third of the price of the new OLED UltraSharp 30 monitor.

In fact, price remains to be the biggest stumbling block that’s preventing the widespread adoption of OLED displays. If we were to compare similar-sized televisions using OLED and LCD displays, the OLED model will cost about 40% more. And according to IHS Research, it is estimated that it would cost manufacturers double to LG has been OLED’s most visible proponent, and earlier this year at CES 2016, it unveiled its new G6 OLED televisions. Supporting 4K resolution and available in 77 and 65-inch sizes, the display of these new televisions is just 2.57 mm thick. The bezels are also just as thin. In fact, it’s so thin that LG is calling the G6 televisions Picture-On-Glass.

To complete the futuristic look, the back of the television is translucent, and the televisions have forward-facing soundbar speakers. These new televisions run webOS 3.0, and also support OLED HDR and HDR formats such as HDR10 and DolbyVision. put an OLED display into a PC as opposed to an LCD display.

New technology is always costly to manufacture partly because of immature manufacturing processes and also high R&D costs. This was the case for SSDs too, but look at how affordable they are now. Thankfully, prices of OLED displays could come down in the next year or so. The technology is fairly mature now and volume manufacturing by key players in the industry looks set to take place in the near future.

LG has just invested US$380 million to build a new factory to ramp up production of OLED displays, which should help bring down the costs of OLED panels in time. Before LG’s investment, Samsung announced an even larger US$3.6 billion investment in February last year to build more OLED panels. Japan Display, another large producer of LCD panels, also announced that it would start mass production of OLED displays in 2018.

It seems that whatever hesitations manufacturers had about OLED technology have been allayed, and it’s likely that OLED could be the predominant display technology in the not so distant future.