Sony initially kicked off the war claiming that OLED technology was superior. Panasonic claimed that Plasma was better than both OLED and LED while Samsung is backing both plasma and LED TV technology and will shortly have an OLED offering along with LG.
The experts say that LED and not OLED will be the winner in the mass TV market however, they do say that OLED has a place in the market due the unique way that it can be manufactured.
They claim that the emergence of LED backlight technology has yielded enhancement in image quality with respect to contrast and colour gamut. Additional benefits of LED backlight is in the reduction in power consumption and reduction in thickness of TV.
Plasma TV has been claiming higher contrast than LCD TV in dark environments. With the use of LED backlight with image adaptive dimming, this advantage is gradually being lost. The colour gamut of RGB LED lit LCD TV is the highest of all types of TV including OLED TV.
OLED panels are supposed to be thin because there is no backlight involved. The Sony 11" OLED TV which is being sold in Australia for the ridiculous price of $6,999 is claimed by Sony to be 3mm at the "thinnest point of the TV". Samsung said of this claim "Even if the OLED panel is only 3mm thick, the TV will need to be 25mm or so – we are getting close to that with LCD technology." (In fact, the thickness of recent models of LCD TVs is likely to be far less than 25 mm).
According to Analyst Munisamy Anandan of the Gerson Lehrman Group, this is true for LED-lit LCD TV as long as the backlight is fabricated in the 'edge-lit' mode. But the edge-lit mode will not be giving the advantage of high colour gamut. In the 'direct-lit' mode of LED backlight, OLED TV has the advantage of slimness but has to face a stiff competition in power consumption because of the 'image adaptive dimming' employed in 'direct-lit' mode.
