Sony 'awfully close' to 27 inch OLED TVs

Sony's 11 inch OLED TV
Sony's 11 inch OLED TV

Sony president and COO Stan Glasgow believes the company is very close to selling 27-inch OLED TVs, trumping the current 11-inchers selling for over £1000.

The larger sizes are the next step on the company's roadmap - and after that it plans to go one step further with a 40 inch model, which would really place OLED technology right in the thick of the LCD / Plasma race.

LCDs - too fat

OLED TVs have long been tipped as the 'next big thing' in home entertainment; theoretically they can be manufactured easily and cheaply, with a superb picture and ultra-thin form factor.

LCD is plugging away at eroding that advantage, and recent slim efforts from companies like JVC have shown just what can be done with a little effort.

But Sony's decision would put it squarely at the front of the OLED race, with rivals yet to even release anything to compete with the incumbent screen the Japanese company has out.

Factory issues

The problem with stepping up the sizes is manufacture-based. Making bigger displays using current methods involves evaporation and minute templates to get the OLED materials into pixels.

At larger sizes, the yields (i.e. the amount of displays good enough for sale) is just too low, so manufacture becomes too much.

But work is constantly being done on this problem and Sony believes it will have a cost-effective method in the near future.

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.