OLED: Organic Light Emitting Diodes

Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (brief: OLED) are light-emitting panels made from organic, carbon-based materials that emit light when electricity is applied to it. OLEDs are used today to make beautiful and efficient displays and large, efficient and beautiful designer lighting solutions.

OLED Lighting – A gentle introduction

An OLED ‘light source’ is basically a thin film of material that emits light. OLED is one of the few technologies that can create large “area” lighting panels. Opposed sources, such as point or linear lights need significantly more distance to the diffuser surface, which make them insufficient for  planar lighting solutions.

Figure 1: OLED lighting explained by OSRAM experts.

OLEDs, on the contrary, are very flat in appearance and have a very uniform light surface. They can be used to make flexible and transparent panels, and can also be color-tunable. OLEDs emit beautiful soft diffused light – in fact OLEDs lighting is the closest light source to natural light (with the exception of the old incandescent lamps).

Figure 2: LG Display (Luflex) is one of the few companies around the globe today offering flexible OLED lighting panels. Images: Euroluce 2019, LG booth.

Several companies offer OLED lighting panels for lighting design applications – including Philips/OLEDWorks, Osram, LG, Konica Minolta and others. Current production lines are still small, prices are still high, and performance is low, but we see rapid advances in performance and price and hopefully OLED lighting prices will drop dramatically once mass production is achieved.

Lightly Technologies – OLED like panels with the power of LED

We try to avoid commercial phrasings and external brand promotions, but worth mentioning here is the solution of Lightly Technologies, the Hikari SQ. As far as we are aware, this is the only commercially available solution with the appearance of OLED but the performance and lifespan of LED.

Figure 3: Hikari SQ by Lightly Tech – worlds first serious counterpart for OLED panels.

The tiny light modules go hand in hand with Luximprint Optographix solutions. As such, they provide appealing, brand new solutions for lighting design and brand promotion.

At Luximprint, we follow the developments around OLED with great interest, as the planar light sources enable direct application of optical layers and surface textures.