Eastman Kodak has been awarded a $1.7 million (£1m) grant from the US Department of Energy to further develop of OLED lighting manufacture, which could result in a huge reduction in the cost of producing the next-gen light source.
The grant, which is designed to help develop the technology and processes to make OLED manufacture more efficient, will help make production possible to a greater number of companies on a wider scale, bringing the cost of an OLED light source down by up to 75 per cent.
Kodak will be making an OLED that meets stringent energy and colour standards as part of the project, in order to show how the technology can be made to work to current lighting standards.
Inject the Vapor
Kodak will be using its Vapor Injection Source Technology, which wastes 20 per cent less OLED materials in the production process and enables a faster production of OLED panels, which could then be licensed out to other manufacturers in the future if it's proven to be a viable manufacturing tool.
OLED lighting differs from the LCD rival most are familiar with in that it doesn't need to create millions of pixels, rather a much smaller number of different colours layered on top of one another to create a variety of light sources.
Alternatively, using a phosphor laid on top of another colour of OLED, white light can be easily created, although the colour reproduction isn't as deep as created by the multi-hue variant.
See the Kodak press release here
