Will super-thin OLED screens become the next big thing in TV technology or are they a very thin and expensive red herring? Even the TV industry can't decide.

Sony has been slow to build on its 2007 OLED XEL-1 launch and rival Samsung has been playing down the significance of the technology.

But that hasn't stopped market analysts at Display Search predicting that the global market for OLED will be worth $5.5 billion by 2015, the year it believes that TV will become a more important market for OLED than mobile devices.

Display Search also goes out on a limb, suggesting that the main proponents of the technology will be Panasonic, LG, Toshiba and Samsung. Sony is absent from its list, apparently with good reason.

'We're more focused on big-screen technology at the moment,' says Darren Ambridge, Sony's Group Product Manager for TVs. 'We really made the XEL-1 just to prove that we could make it.'

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