TrendForce: 8K, the Next Frontier for QLED TVs?

OLED continues to dominate the high-end TV market in 2018, TrendForce's WitsView says, with shipments reaching a high of 2.5 million-- a "significant" increase over the shipments of 1.5m of 2017.

Samsung QLEDDriving such growth are more brands entering the OLED market, as well as promotional efforts from major vendors such as Sony. This comes despite the problems of OLED technology, namely colour decay and burn-in issues, and more companies are looking into further developing the technology. On the other hand QLED TV makers, including Samsung, TCL and Hisense, are finding the high pricing of QLED an issue when it comes to promotion.

QLED TV makers insist their technology offers better colour saturation and no lifespan problems, but self-emitting QD displays are still to meet commercial demand. This is due to failure in long-lasting light output, the result of low external quantum efficiency. Therefore, in the short term, QLED TVs still use backlighting via quantum dot enhancement film (QDEF), leading to TV sets thicker (and thus less competitive) than OLED alternatives.

As such, WitsView predicts the next generation of QLED TVs will enter mass production in 2020 at the earliest. However this should allow for further improvement of the technology, particularly since while OLED TVs can only reach a maximum resolution of 4K, QD technology has no resolution limits. As such, 8K resolution might bring a "breakthrough opportunity" for QLED vendors wanting to break into the high-end TV market.

Go TrendForce: OLED TV remains its dominance in high-end market, while 8K TV may be a breakthrough opportunity for QLED