Advantages:
The different manufacturing process of OLEDs lends itself to several advantages over flat-panel displays made with LCD technology.
Although the method is not currently commercially viable for mass production, OLEDs can be printed onto any suitable substrate using an inkjet printer or even screen printing technologies, they could theoretically have a lower cost than LCDs or plasma displays. However, it is the fabrication of the substrate that is the most complex and expensive process in the production of a TFT LCD, so any savings offered by printing the pixels is easily cancelled out by OLED’s requirement to use a more costly LTPS substrate – a fact that is borne out by the significantly higher initial price of AMOLED displays than their TFT LCD competitors. A mitigating factor to this price differential going into the future is the cost of retooling existing lines to produce AMOLED displays over LCDs to take advantage of the economies of scale afforded by mass production.
Use of flexible substrates could open the door to new applications such as roll-up displays and displays embedded in fabrics or clothing.
OLEDs can enable a greater artificial contrast ratio (both dynamic range and static, measured in purely dark conditions) and viewing angle compared to LCDs because OLED pixels directly emit light. OLED pixel colours appear correct and unshifted, even as the viewing angle approaches 90 degrees from normal. LCDs filter the light emitted from a backlight, allowing a small fraction of light through so they cannot show true black, while an inactive OLED element produces no light and consumes no power.
OLEDs can also have a faster response time than standard LCD screens. Whereas LCD displays are capable of a 1 ms response time or less offering a frame rate of 1,000 Hz or higher, an OLED can theoretically have less than 0.01 ms response time enabling 100,000 Hz refresh rates.
Disadvantages:
1) Outdoor performance
As an emissive display technology, OLEDs rely completely upon converting electricity to light, unlike most LCDs which are to some extent reflective; e-ink leads the way in efficiency with ~ 33% ambient light reflectivity, enabling the display to be used without any internal light source.
OLEDs typically produce only around 200 nits of light leading to poor readability in bright ambient light, such as outdoors. Displays with some degree of reflectiveness increase their brightness as ambient light increases, so overcoming unwanted surface reflections without using any additional power.
2) Water damage
Water can damage the organic materials of the displays. Therefore, improved sealing processes are important for practical manufacturing. Water damage may especially limit the longevity of more flexible displays.
3) Power consumption
While an OLED will consume around 40% of the power of an LCD displaying an image which is primarily black, for the majority of images, it will consume 60–80% of the power of an LCD – however it can use over three times as much power to display an image with a white background[47] such as a document or website. This can lead to disappointing real-world battery life in mobile devices.
4) Color balance issues
Additionally, as the OLED material used to produce blue light degrades significantly more rapidly than the materials that produce other colors, blue light output will decrease relative to the other colors of light. This differential color output change will change the color balance of the display and is much more noticeable than a decrease in overall luminance. This can be partially avoided by adjusting colour balance but this may require advanced control circuits and interaction with the user, which is unacceptable for some uses.
In order to delay the problem, manufacturers bias the colour balance towards blue so that the display initially has an artificially blue tint, leading to complaints of artificial-looking, over-saturated colors.
5) Screen burn-in
Unlike displays with a common light source, the brightness of each OLED pixel fades depending on the content displayed. The varied lifespan of the organic dyes can cause a discrepency between red, green, and blue intensity. This leads to image-persistance, also known as burn-in.
6) Lifespan
The biggest technical problem for OLEDs is the limited lifetime of the organic materials. In particular, blue OLEDs historically have had a lifetime of around 14,000 hours to half original brightness (five years at 8 hours a day) when used for flat-panel displays. This is lower than the typical lifetime of LCD, LED or PDP technology—each currently rated for about 60,000 hours to half brightness, depending on manufacturer and model. However, some manufacturers displays aim to increase the lifespan of OLED displays, pushing their expected life past that of LCD displays by improving light outcoupling, thus achieving the same brightness at a lower drive current.
In 2007, experimental OLEDs