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The reports notes that the panels will be produced on new production lines that will be installed at a display-panel-manufacturing joint venture owned by Panasonic and Hitachi, the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun reported last week.

OLED is a flat-panel display technology that uses an organic material in the pixel layer that emits its own light, thereby eliminating a backlight.
This layer usually contains a polymer substance that allows suitable organic compounds to be deposited.

They are deposited in rows and columns onto a flat carrier by a simple "printing" process. The resulting matrix of pixels can emit light of different colors.

That makes the displays thinner and also much less power-hungry. OLED screens can also handle fast-moving images better and offer richer colour reproduction than current LCDs and Plasma displays.

Although Sony kicked off the OLED TV market late last year when it began selling the 11-inch XEL-1 TV in Japan, it is still a very expensive technology.
 
However, Panasonics move has come at an opportune time as both Toshiba and Samsung have revealed plans to launch a 30-inch-class OLED by 2010.